Well glad I can still post here. I have looked at my posts
on RB for the last two days and I do not know why I got thrown
off. Does anybody know how long this lasts for. Is it forever or
is it for a week or two? I did not get any warnings nor did I get
a notice that I had been booted. I had a system crash yesterday
and I ran a new spy bot program and I thought it may have removed
something Lycos had placed on my machine. I dont know. Any way
here is some info.
A new gene
The New York Times today reports the results of an Icelandic company’s detection of a gene that increases the risk of heart attacks among black people by more than 250%.
“The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta.
“Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent. The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics,” the story says.
The finding leads now to discussions about race-based medicine, specifically with the Association of Black Cardiologists about “whether to test a new heart attack drug specifically in a population of African-Americans,” the story says.
“Geneticists agree that the medically important issue is not race itself but the genes that predispose a person to disease. But it may often be useful for physicians to take race into account because the predisposing genes for many diseases follow racial patterns,” the story says.
I find it absolutely fascinating how the science of disease discovery has become a nearly personalized process.
Take Care
Arch
