https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/health/heart-disease-mutations-stem-cells.html
Few doctors, and even fewer patients, have heard of CHIP.
But it is emerging as a major cause of heart attacks and
stroke, as deadly as high blood pressure or cholesterol.
It’s
been one of the vexing questions in medicine: Why is it that most
people who have heart attacks or strokes have few or no conventional
risk factors?
These
are patients with normal levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, no
history of smoking or diabetes, and no family history of cardiovascular
disease. Why aren’t they spared?
To
some researchers, this hidden risk is the dark matter of cardiology: an
invisible but omnipresent force that lands tens of thousands of
patients in the hospital each year. But now scientists may have gotten a
glimpse of part of it.
They have learned that a bizarre accumulation of mutated stem cells in bone marrow increases a person’s risk of dying
within a decade, usually from a heart attack or stroke, by 40 or 50
percent. They named the condition with medical jargon: clonal
hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential.
Rest of story at link.
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