Authors: Samuel Chang, Kerstin Preuss, Benjamin Lin, Sayan Bakshi, C. Ryan Miller, Adam Wende
Published: 2024-11-14
DOI: 10.1161/circ.150.suppl_1.4147025
Source: Full article
Heart failure (HF) treatment advances have improved outcomes but HF heterogeneity leads to ~50% response to standard therapies, emphasizing a need to further study mechanisms of disparate outcomes. One serious disparity is increased cardiovascular disease risk and mortality in African Americans (AA) compared to Caucasian Americans (CA). Race is a social construct and thus poor proxy for physiology; hence, our lab studies epigenetics, stable yet reversible changes to DNA serving as a possible interface of how environment impacts gene regulation. We’ve previously implicated cardiac DNA methylation as a new indicator of socio-economic disparities in HF outcomes. Related to HF, US adult obesity rates are 40% and similar disparities exist with AA having higher rates, and studies on obesity show how inequity leads to disparate rates. Thus, our secondary analysis investigates the role of obesity, through its impact on cardiac epigenetics and transcription, as an underlying environment/molecular driver within HF disparities.