LDS Hospital gets NIH research grant

LDS Hospital researchers hope to figure out the genetics of high cholesterol so that prevention efforts and treatment can be tailored for individuals.

The National Institutes of Health awarded the hospital's Cardiovascular Research Department a four-year, $2.3 million grant to undertake the unique and potentially groundbreaking study, which will begin immediately using genetic information already collected from more than 10,000 heart patient volunteers who have been tested or treated in the hospital's cardiac cath lab.

The Intermountain Heart Collaborative Study is the largest clinical genetic study and database of heart patients in the world.

High cholesterol is just one risk factor long recognized as contributing to heart disease, which is the leading killer in Utah and across the nation. And both cholesterol and heart disease have familial — or genetic — factors, though they're not well understood, said Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, professor of medicine at the University of Utah Medical School and associate chief of cardiology at LDS Hospital.

Anderson believes the grant recognizes both the importance of understanding the genetic underpinnings of heart disease and the role Utahns' "great record of voluntarism" can play in medical discovery. More than a decade ago, LDS Hospital established a databank with DNA samples from people who had come through the cardiology cath lab because of heart disease. Because of the source of the DNA, the researchers also know some of the medical outcomes, such as whether the DNA donor has died of heart disease.

Part of the NIH grant will be used to go back and test the collected samples for six genes that are already known to impact cholesterol metabolism, to look for variants in those genes and determine how they work and if or how they contribute to heart disease. They're not rare mutations but common genetic changes, said Anderson, lead investigator for the study.

The goal is to build a "genetic risk score that might help us better understand the genetics of risk for heart disease that we so poorly understand now," he said. To do that, the variants most likely involved would be analyzed and ranked in some way so they become standard markers of risk.