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My name is Steve Humphries.
I'm the Emeritus British
Heart Foundation Professor of
Cardiovascular Genetics at
University College in London.
I'm going to talk today
about heart disease genes,
and single nucleotide
polymorphisms or SNPs.
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The outline of the
talk is shown here.
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I want to start by
discussing what
are the common risk
factors for heart disease.
Now, you probably
can all name these,
but here is a list
of what I think are the
most important ones.
Age and male gender are by
far the largest factors.
Smoking, obesity,
having high blood
pressure, being diabetic.
Then we get down to
things like having a lack
of exercise in your
lifestyle or lots of stress.
Then things we can measure
in the blood is having
high low-density
lipoprotein, or LDL.
In the lay press,
that's called the
bad cholesterol,
or low high-density
lipoprotein, that's HDL.
In the lay press that's
called the good cholesterol.
Now when you look
at these factors,
you can see that
some are modifiable.
You can obviously change
whether you're smoking.
You can maybe lose weight.
You can start taking
more exercise.
Some are purely genetic.
Clearly you can't do
anything about your gender.
Then some are a bit of both.
In other words, you
could say, well,
I'm smoking because
I've got a bad genes,
but clearly that's part
of your environment.
The same thing with some of
the other factors there.
When we're thinking about
what's causing heart disease,
we've got to consider both
genes and the environment.
Let's talk now about what are
the processes of heart disease.
In some of the slides, I'll call
this CHD or coronary
heart disease.
