C-Reactive Protein – A cause of heart disease or an eye witness to it?

C Reactive protein has received a lot of attention in recent years as a laboratory marker for heart disease. A study to be published in the Journal of the Medical Association today however refutes this association as a causal one.

An earlier study showed that lowering high C-Reactive Protein levels through treatment with Statins (a class of medicines used for treating high cholesterol and that also lower C-Reactive Protein) made heart disease patients less prone to heart attacks. This generated the hypothesis that C reactive Protein contributes to heart disease.

This study tried to answer the question regarding causality, using a new method called Mendelian Randomization. This method uses genetic markers and tools to determine relatively quickly whether a particular protein causes a condition or not. Had C-Reactive Protein been a cause of heart disease, then people with genes that produced higher levels of C-Reactive Protein vs. lower levels would have had higher and lower rates of heart disease respectively. This in fact was not the case; there was no such pattern seen in the study population which consisted of nearly 100,000 individuals.

What is the possible role of C-Reactive Protein in heart disease then? It is already known that C-Reactive Protein is a marker for inflammation in the body. It is also known that inflammation is probably the most likely cause of plaque formation in the arteries. Thus heart disease and high C-Reactive Protein levels are both symptoms of increased inflammation.  High C-Reactive Protein could still indicate that a person is at increased risk of developing heart disease without actually being responsible for the increased risk itself.  This finding is important because it shows that developing medicines to lower C-Reactive Protein in heart patients is not the answer to lowering risk of heart disease in them and that the search for answers must still continue

By, The Dietetic Team @ NutritionVista.com