Class blog for sharing and commenting on current events in biology.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Link Between Heart Disease and Height Hidden In Our Genes

Harris, Richard. "Link Between Heart Disease And Height Hidden In Our Genes." NPR. NPR, 8 Apr. 2015. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

The article “Link Between Heart Disease And Height Hidden In Our Genes” discusses a new study on why taller people are less likely to have coronary heart disease than shorter people. This recent study says part of this reason lies in the genes. The article states that doctors have known about the correlation between height and the disease since the 1950s, but it has not really been clear as to why this is. A cardiologist from the University of Leicester in the UK tested a group of people of short stature and tested whether they were at a high risk for coronary artery disease as well. Looking at the genes of over 200,000 people, they found the relationship to be very ‘striking.’
This is extremely important to society because despite the shortcomings of the experiment, there could be some treatments emerging from this. This however, would not be a short-term possibility. This study shows how science is ‘on the edge of having a deeper understanding of many traits...’ such as ones that cause diseases and influence a person’s life length.
I thought the article was very interesting and explained in great the shortcomings of the experiment and ways to improve it. However, I wish the author discussed the significance of the experiment more and why it so important to see the relationship between diseases and genes.

5 comments:

  1. This article is similar to the article I read about how there are taller people in the Netherlands. They bring up similar points about how taller people are less likely to inherit heart disease as opposed to shorter people. I like how the article goes into detail about specific studies. Seems like an interesting article and it is amazing how far scientists have come in genetic studies.

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  2. This article is similar to the article I read about how there are taller people in the Netherlands. They bring up similar points about how taller people are less likely to inherit heart disease as opposed to shorter people. I like how the article goes into detail about specific studies. Seems like an interesting article and it is amazing how far scientists have come in genetic studies.

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  3. Alexa did a great job on this current event, especially with how she described the experiment that was done to determine the cause of the relationship between a person's height and their risk of heart disease. Also, she made it clear how the correlation between these two characteristics of a person was their gene relationship since they were very similar between all of the people. Another aspect done well was how it tells us that scientists are on the verge of understanding many more traits. Two things I never knew before were that short people have a higher risk of heart and that scientists are on the verge of being able to prevent many diseases and discovering what affects a person's life length. One thing to improve on is describing the article more.

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  4. Alexa did a good job on her current event. She included statistics and briefly explained the article. She also described the main point it is trying to get across. I found your choice in article to be very interesting and I never really realized the connection between height and heart disease. I also found it interesting that doctors had known about this connection since the 1950's but they did not have enough evidence to back it up. One thing that would make your report even better is to include more details and statistics about this study.

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  5. I think Alexa did a good job on this current event.She did a good job of explaining why this relation between heart disease and height is important. I also think she did a good job of giving lots of details in the current event, even giving us the website the researchers used. She also mentioned that they may be able to develop treatments because of this. One thing I found very interesting is that they knew about this in the 1950's because I have not heard about it until now. Another thing. I would also like to know if this experiment would have the same outcome in America or other countries.

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