Study links blood type to risk of heart disease posted 8/15/2012 7:36:25 PM | 0 kudos what's this?     report abuse tagged: straddle, news, health, blood

StraddleMyNose

Since I have asked people what their blood type was some time ago on here, I thought that this was an interesting article to share on here.


LOS ANGELES — There’s potentially good news for the 45 percent of Americans who have type O blood: Researchers said yesterday that those people appear to have a slightly lower risk of developing heart disease.

Dr. Lu Qi, an assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, analyzed heart-disease risk in two large, multidecade health studies — the Nurses’ Health Study, which was launched in 1976, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, launched in 1986.

Adjusting for heart-disease risk factors including diet, diabetes status, gender and race, Qi and his colleagues found that study participants with type AB blood had the largest heart-disease risk — 20 percent greater than that of people with type O blood. Type B was next with an 11 percent greater risk, and type A was third with an 8 percent greater risk, the scientists reported.

The trend held up when the researchers compared their results with several other population studies recording the same factors. Across seven studies, the increased risk for people with non-O blood types was 11 percent higher than that for people with type O.

Rh factor — positive or negative — was not correlated with any differences in heart-disease risk.

The researchers noted that non-O individuals have higher levels of two proteins involved in clotting and atherosclerosis — and that people with type A blood, in particular, have been reported to have higher levels of serum total cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol.

The research appeared in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, which is published by the American Heart Association. In a statement released by that organization, Qi said that learning more about the relationship between blood type and heart-disease risk could help doctors tailor their advice — perhaps urging patients with type A blood to watch their cholesterol more carefully.


The Columbus Dispatch

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