Heart disease and stroke can be all in the family . In ongoing research at the Framingham Heart Study, which has been tracking the lives of 5,209 Massachusetts adults, many now in their eighties and nineties, for almost 50 years, investigators found that strokes were three times more common among men and women whose parents had had heart disease. In a second Framingham report, researchers concluded that people were 29 percent more likely to develop heart disease if a parent also had had cardiovascular ailments, says Dr. Myers, lead author of the study. I don't think we're going to find a single gene that causes these two diseases. But there are a number of genes that increase blood pressure and others that affect cholesterol.
Researchers find a pair of breast cancer genes.
Only 5 percent of breast cancers are hereditary. Women who have an inherited breast cancer gene do tend to get the disease 10 to 15 years earlier than other women. Overall, the great majority of these breast cancers will develop between the ages of 50 and 70. Other researchers have isolated genes linked to melanoma and colon and ovarian cancer, Dr. White says. This may help explain why people who smoke have more heart attacks than nonsmokers.