Weighing in on heart health
By Gracie Gutierrez
How much does your weight and your lifestyle affect your risk of heart disease and heart attacks?
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions hope a new federally funded study will help them quantify those factors.
The three-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will enable researchers to identify chemicals in the blood called markers that indicate a risk of heart disease and heart attack and determine how those markers are affected by changes in weight and lifestyle.
The study is part of the Look AHEAD (Action for Health in Diabetes) study.
Link between inflammation and heart disease
"What we are finding is that cardiovascular events as well as diabetes are caused by inflammation of the adipose (or fat) tissue," said Christie Ballantyne, M.D., professor of medicine at BCM and an expert in the field of biomarkers for disease. Markers of inflammation could play a role in defining and quantifying heart disease risk, he said.
The Look AHEAD study, led by John Foreyt, Ph.D., professor of medicine at BCM, will follow 5,000 people who are overweight and have diabetes – both conditions that lead to inflammation. Each person will be educated in how to change his or her habits, adding diet or exercise to daily routines.
"We are looking at how each intervention works for each person. We want to know how diet or exercise affects the fat tissue," Ballantyne said. "That will then show us how these interventions affect the heart."
Finding better treatment
Previous studies showed that as people lost weight and maintained the loss, there was a decrease in inflammation.
"These findings will lead to better ways of treating people at risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events." Ballantyne said.
Funding for this study was provided by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers from the University of Vermont Medical College, Wake Forest University Health Sciences in Winston-Salem, N.C., The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and St. Luke's Roosevelt Institute for Health Sciences in New York are also contributing to this study.
