Heart disease shares genetic link with dental disease

MedWire News: German researchers have found a genetic link between dental disease and heart disease.

Periodontitis and coronary heart disease share a genetic variant on chromosome 9, the team revealed at the European Society of Human Genetics meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Lead researcher Dr Arne Schaefer, from the University of Kiel in Germany, said he hoped the findings would make it easier to diagnose periodontitis at an early stage and “might open the way to effective treatment before the disease can take hold”.

Periodontitis leads to the loss of connective tissue and bone support for teeth, and is a major cause of tooth loss in people aged over 40 years.

Previous studies have linked it with coronary heart disease, with both conditions sharing risk factors and relating to an inflammatory process.

Dr Schaefer’s team examined whether there could be a shared genetic susceptibility to both conditions and focused on a “genetic susceptibility locus” on chromosome 9 that had previously been linked to heart attacks.

The team compared 1097 patients with coronary heart disease who had already experienced a heart attack and 151 suffering from the most aggressive, early-onset forms of periodontitis and found that the genetic variation associated with both diseases was identical.

The findings were confirmed in 1100 patients with coronary heart disease and 180 with periodontitis.

The genetic region codes for an ‘antisense’ DNA called ANRIL, which does not encode a protein but can impair its expression in cells.

Dr Schaefer said his team would be trying to find out more about more about how ANRIL operates in both healthy and diseased gums.

He said that “because of its association with coronary heart disease, we think that periodontitis should be taken very seriously by dentists and diagnosed and treated as early as possible”.