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Cardiovascular disease

Commonality with cancer

Nature volume 543, pages 45–47 (2017)Cite this article

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Ageing is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease caused by the rupture of inflamed cholesterol plaques in arteries. It emerges that this might be partly due to genetic mutations that cause cancerous changes in white blood cells.

Ageing is a prominent risk factor for a condition called atherosclerosis, in which cholesterol accumulates in arteries as plaques. When plaques become inflamed, they can rupture or erode, leading to blood clots that occlude the arteries and cause heart attacks and strokes. One possible driver is clonal haematopoiesis — a phenomenon in which mutations arise in blood-forming haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) during ageing, and promote the proliferation of blood-cell populations bearing these mutations at the expense of wild-type blood lineages. But how this phenomenon might drive atherosclerosis has been unclear. Writing in Science, Fuster et al.1 outline a pathway by which deficiency in the gene Tet2 causes accelerated atherosclerosis through clonal haematopoiesis in mice.

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Figure 1: A mechanism for accelerated atherosclerosis.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alan R. Tall is in the Division of Molecular Medicine, Department of Medicine, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA.,

    Alan R. Tall

  2. Ross L. Levine is in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program and Leukemia Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York 10065, USA.,

    Ross L. Levine

Authors
  1. Alan R. Tall
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  2. Ross L. Levine
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alan R. Tall or Ross L. Levine.

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Tall, A., Levine, R. Commonality with cancer. Nature 543, 45–47 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21505

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