Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Indians more prone to heart attacks?

"Most of us have heard that we should eat less fat and ghee, skip the junk food, pass on the soft drinks, and lace up our running shoes regularly to keep our hearts strong, bodies slim, and our blood sugar regulated. What you may not know is that if you are of South Asian descent (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives, or Nepal), you have an increased risk of developing heart disease, a big unhealthy gut, and type 2 diabetes, regardless of your other risk factors. That’s right—even if you are a slim, vegetarian, non-smoker with low cholesterol and average blood pressure, simply being Indian puts you at risk for these conditions." says Ranjan Sinha using a study in US. May be but I am not so sure.  Indians in US are not representative of Indians in India, I think that many tend to be from upper castes. Because of endogamy and such, it is known that there are differences in castes:
"Now, scientists have furnished genetic evidence to show that several thousand years ago, India experienced a change in ways of living, after the caste system came into being.
Marriages between different groups or communities became rarer leading to less mixing of genes between groups. Before this change, people easily married outside of their groups leading to a wider intermixing of genes, they said. 
Dr Lalji Singh, molecular biologist, vice- chancellor of Benaras Hindu University Varanasi, and one of the authors of a recent paper on the subject, said in an email to Express, “We have been able to conclude that admixture in North India had occurred approximately 2,000 years ago, while South India saw it approximately 4,000 years ago.  Earlier, we had described a mutation (change) which is responsible for sudden cardiac arrest; it originated 30,000 years ago and spread in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia etc. We also found that the caste system in India is a more recent phenomenon.’’ Singh  said that less intermixing has led to the finding of genetically recessive disorders. “Many Indian groups contain genetic variants which account for substantial rates of recessive diseases like Pseudocholinesterase deficiency in the Vysya population of Andhra Pradesh; Familial Madras Motor Neuron Disease (FMMND) that has a unique geographic distribution in Tirupati-Chittoor, Southern India; sickle cell anaemia in some North and Northeast Indian populations, including the tribes of Chhattisgarh; Handigodu syndrome seen in Sagara taluk of Shimoga district of Karnataka; predominance of breast cancer among Parsis and occurrence of sudden cardiac arrests in South Asians.”"
From Genetic Ancestry of Indians. A new Paper is Creating Ruckus by Suvrat Kher (2009):
"3) The findings indicate that there is a larger amount of genetic variation between Indian groups than there is between say European groups. This the authors suggest is a result of a small number of individuals founding different ethnic groups that then remained endogamous and therefore genetically divergent. This has important medical value as recessive diseases may correlate with ethnic groups."
P.S. Note that the full article quoted above and the last d not agree.

No comments: