Study: Mom's health plays bigger factor in child's risk

If both parents had the disease, the risk more than doubled.
SCRIPPS HOWARD
More so than with Dad, if Mom had or has heart disease, you might want to go the extra mile toward protecting your own heart, according to a new study.
The findings, presented late last week in New York at a briefing on heart disease and being published in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, could better guide the treatment of patients who have a family history of coronary problems and who show early signs they may be headed for trouble themselves.
"Current risk assessments mention family history of coronary disease, but do not necessarily take into account the sex of the parent or if both parents have the disease," said Dr. Kristina Sundquist, an assistant professor at the Karolinska Institute's Center for Family Medicine in Stockholm, Sweden.
"If some patients are at higher familial risk, they might need more aggressive treatment of any other disease factors that they have," Sundquist said.
Assembled database
Sundquist and colleagues created a database using Swedish-government registries of deaths and hospital discharges. The researchers tracked all Swedish men and women born since 1932 and their registered parents, along with all heart-disease-related hospital admissions and deaths in both groups.
The result was a database of 10,946 male patients and 3,281 female patients who had a mother and/or father with heart disease.
Researchers compared the number of heart-disease patients with a parental history of the disease to the number of heart patients with no parental history of such disease.
The scientists found that men had a 55 percent greater risk of developing disease if they had a maternal history of heart disease, and a 41 percent higher risk if their father had heart disease, than male patients with no parental history of coronary problems. The risk more than doubled, to 109 percent, if both parents had heart disease.
The researchers also found that men and women who had at least one parent who developed premature heart disease -- before age 55 in the fathers and 65 in the mothers -- were at even higher risk of themselves developing heart disease.
Sundquist said the reasons for the parental differences in men's and women's percentages of inherited risk are not fully explained by the study, but speculates that greater influence from mothers may be due to genetics, some form of fetal programming of metabolism and other heart-disease risk factors, or the sharing of risky habits and behaviors during childhood.