독일의 연구진들은 환자들이 심장질환에 걸릴 위험이 높은지 아니면, 낮은지를 예측해 줄 수 있는 효소를 발견해냈다고 월요일(현지시각)에 밝혔다.
German Study: Enzyme May Point to Heart Disease
Researchers in Germany said on Monday they had found an enzyme that may predict whether a patient is at risk of heart disease.
The study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, could help researchers learn more about how cholesterol is associated with heart disease, the researchers said.
The enzyme, called hepatic lipase (HL), breaks down triglycerides and fats in lipoproteins -- the "L" in HDL ("good" cholesterol) and LDL ("bad" cholesterol).
Dr. Klaus Dugi and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg in Germany found the more active this enzyme was, the less likely a man was to have coronary artery disease.
Dugi's team measured hepatic lipase activity in the blood of 200 men getting angiograms -- tests that measure whether arteries are clogged.
They said it might be useful to measure HL to look for people most at risk of coronary artery disease and said the enzyme might be the target of future drugs, perhaps aimed at getting the body to produce more of the enzyme.
High density lipoprotein (HDL) or "good" cholesterol carries fat out of the blood and to the liver, where it is disposed of. But the system is complicated and the researchers said it may not be as simple, since more HDL equals less heart disease.
Dugi said he planned more studies to find out if low HL activity is linked to higher risk of heart attack.
http://news.lycos.com/news/story.asp?section=Science&storyId=302342
(소스: http://news.lycos.com/)
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