LONDON, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- The gradual erosion of
telomeres, the strands of DNA capping chromosomes that wear away with each cell
division, may play a pivotal role in heart disease, and drugs called statins may
limit the damage, the New Scientist reported on Friday on its website.
Researchers from Leicester and Glasgow Universities
in the United Kingdom found that people who have much shorter telomeres are more
likely to suffer from heart attacks.
In the five-year research, they first took blood
samples from 484 middle-aged men with moderately raised cholesterol and from
1058 control subjects, and compared the telomere lengths in their white blood
cells.
The researchers eventually found both patients and
controls with the shortest telomeres were twice as likely to have developed
serious heart disease,
They also found that statins, which are better known
for their cholesterol-lowering properties, appeared to alleviate the effects of
telomere damage and may even protect telomeres against degradation.
But the protective effect of statins was only seen in
patients with comparatively short telomeres.
"In patients whose telomeres were wearing away at a
normal rate, statin treatment didn't make any difference. This suggests that
statins were protecting against the worst cases of telomere degradation. Without
statins they might have been even shorter," Leicester University cardiologist
Nilesh Samani, who led the research, was quoted as saying.
For years, doctors and scientists have suspected that
another property of statins, unrelated to their cholesterol-lowering ability,
explained how they protected patients from heart disease and stroke so
effectively.
The discoveries made by Samani's team provide
important new insights into the causes of arterial disease.
Samani said exactly how statins might limit the
damage caused by telomere shortening or even directly protect telomeres was "
speculation at this stage," but his group has already begun laboratory studies
to test how the drugs interact with telomeres.
