Living a healthy life can reduce the risk of having a heart attack, even if the genes say otherwise.
It is known that genes and lifestyle affect cardiac risk, but the influence of each of these factors is unknown, and if one factor can compensate the other.
A new study has found that even people with a high genetic risk of heart problems can reduce their chances of having a heart attack, or other heart problems, by half if they do not smoke, eat healthy, exercise and maintain weight.
A healthy lifestyle mitigate the damage of defective genes
The researchers combined information on more than 55,000 people who were screened for the presence of any of the 50 genes that have been linked to cardiac risk.
And depending on how many genes of these were five groups were formed.
They were also classified into three groups based on healthy lifestyle factors: not being obese, exercising at least eleven a week, eating a healthy diet and not smoking.
The pro lifestyle group had at least three of these four factors, while the unfavorable group had one or none.
The results showed that people with the highest genetic risk were almost twice as likely to develop heart problems as people in the lower genetic risk group.
The same thing happened more or less when comparing the group of unfavorable lifestyle, against that of favorable lifestyle.
But when the genetic and lifestyle factors were combined it was found that an unfavorable lifestyle and a high genetic risk, makes the risk of having a heart attack for the next 10 years is 10%.
But a high genetic risk combined with a good lifestyle, causes the probability of infarction to be reduced to only 5%.
