Headline September 14, 2018/ '' 'STUDENTS -DNA- STORIES' ''

'' 'STUDENTS -DNA- STORIES' ''

IN JULY -SCIENTISTS reported that a strange protein courses through the veins of pregnant woman. *No one is sure what it's there for*.

What makes this protein called Hemo, so unusual is that it's not made by the mother.

Instead, it is made in her fetus and the placenta, by a gene that originally came from a virus that infected our mammalian ancestors more than 100 million years ago.

Dr. Heidmann, who works at Gutave Roussy, a cancer research institute in Paris, discovered a stretch of viral DNA that had gone overlooked. She and her colleagues named it Hemo.

''It's very, very old, so it has to do something,'' Dr. Heidmann said. It's possible that Hemo proteins are a message from fetus to mother, dampening the mother's immune system so that it doesn't attack the fetus.

And with that, we now turn to the Clues on 5 deadly diseases hidden in your DNA.............

DNA is not destiny, Dr. Kathiresan stressed. A healthy lifestyle and cholesterol-lowering medications can substantially reduce risk of heart attack, even in those who have inherited a genetic predisposition.

The new tool can also find people at low end of the risk range for the five diseases.

This prove useful to certain patients ; for example, a woman who is trying to decide when she should start having regular mammograms, or a 40-year-old man with a slightly high cholesterol level who wants to know if he should take a statin.

Still there are concerns about how the genetic test will be used. ''It carries great hope, but also comes with a lot of questions,'' said Dr. David J Maron, director of preventive cardiology at Stanford University.

''Who should get tested? How should the results be provided? Physicians are not generally well trained to provide genetic test results.''

But medical experts said this sort of risk-assessment is the wave of the future. ''I'm not sure we can stop it,'' said Dr. John Mandrola, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Baptist Health in Louisville, Ky.

The study began because there was general agreement among researchers that many common diseases are linked not to one mutation, but rather to thousands or millions of mutations, said the first author of the new paper, Dr. Amit V. Khera, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a researcher at the Broad Institute.

In recent years, scientists have catalogued more than six million tiny changes in DNA that slightly affect the chances that people will get various diseases.

Each of these genetic alterations has such a small effect - a 1 percent or so increase or decrease in a person's odds of getting a disease - that it would not be helpful to test for each one in isolation.

But it should be possible for possible, scientists felt, to combine data on all the small DNA changes to construct an individual risk score.

To do that, the researchers needed an algorithm that would weigh the significance of the variations in the in the genes. Then they had to test the risk scores they obtained.

Dr. Khera and his colleagues turned to the U.K. Biobank, which holds genetic and disease information on half a million people.

The investigators found that their algorithm did predict the odds of having a diagnosis of one of the five diseases.

The researchers also tried their algorithm on 20,000 patients who were seen at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, both in Boston.

They found that those whom the algorithm found had a high risk score for a heart attack were indeed four times as likely as other patients to have had a heart attack.

''Unless I do this genetic testing, there is no way I could pick those people out,'' Dr. Khera said

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