Coronary artery disease and major depression may be genetically linked to increased risk of cardiomyopathy, a degenerative heart muscle disease, through inflammatory pathways, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital say. discovered.

Their report was published April 5 in the journal natural mental healthsuggests that a combination of drugs prescribed for coronary artery disease and depression may reduce inflammation and prevent the development of cardiomyopathy.

“This study suggests that chronic, low-level inflammation may significantly contribute to both depression and cardiovascular disease,” said Vander, lead author of the paper. said Dr. Lee Davis, associate professor of medicine in Bild’s Department of Genetics. Institute.

The relationship between depression and other serious health conditions is well known. As many as 44% of patients with coronary artery disease (CAD), the most common form of cardiovascular disease, are diagnosed with major depression. However, the biological relationship between these two conditions remains poorly understood.

Inflammation may be involved. Changes in the levels of inflammatory markers have been observed in both conditions, suggesting that there may be a common biological pathway linking neuroinflammation in depression and atherosclerotic inflammation in CAD.

In the current study, the researchers used a technique called transcriptome-wide association scanning to map single nucleotide polymorphisms (genetic variations) involved in regulating the expression of genes associated with both CAD and depression. .

This technique identified 185 genes that were significantly associated with both depression and CAD and were “enriched” with biological roles in inflammation and cardiomyopathy. This suggests that predisposition to both depression and CAD, which researchers refer to as (major) depressive CAD, or (m)dCAD, may make individuals more susceptible to cardiomyopathy. are doing.

However, when researchers scanned a large electronic medical record database at VUMC in Massachusetts and the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, they found that cardiomyopathy was more prevalent in patients enriched for the (m)dCAD gene. The actual incidence is that of patients with CAD alone.

One possible explanation is that drugs prescribed for CAD and depression, such as statins and antidepressants, may prevent the development of cardiomyopathy by reducing inflammation, researchers say. concluded.

“Further research is needed to investigate the optimal treatment mechanism, but this study at least suggests that patients’ heart and brain health should be considered together when developing treatment plans for depression and cardiovascular disease.” ,” Dr. Davis added.

The paper’s first author, Dr. Kritika Singh, is a former graduate student in the Davis lab and currently a postdoctoral innovation fellow at Novartis in Cambridge, Massachusetts.