Professor Dungan added if a gene is overactive it “could cause too many platelets to respond to the clot, which could block the flow of blood and oxygen to the heart muscle and lead to a heart attack”.
While RAP1GAP2 was not found to lead to poor cardiovascular outcomes in men, it is believed it could be the culprit for heart disease in women.
This uncertainty forms part of a wider hole in knowledge about how heart disease affects people of different genders, races, and ethnicities.
Dungan believes genetics may play a role in these differences: “Our goal is to find the gene markers most accurately linked to heart disease.”
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