Nearly five million Americans live with heart failure, with as many as 700,000 new cases diagnosed each year. In addition to lifestyle factors, scientists have shown that heart failure has a strong heritable component, but identifying the responsible genes has been a major challenge. Now, new research has identified a common genetic risk factor for heart failure in Caucasians that is also linked to kidney function. The study, a collaboration between the Perelman School of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, and other institutions, was published online this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alpha-synuclein (a-syn) is a brain protein that forms clumps called Lewy bodies, the hallmark of PD and other neurodegenerative disorders.

In earlier studies at other institutions, when fetal nerve cells were transplanted into the brains of PD patients, some of the transplanted cells developed Lewy bodies. This suggests that healthy cells take up abnormal extracellular a-syn, which “recruits” normal a-syn into clumps. However, it is not clear whether the Lewy bodies were formed by the spread of abnormal a-syn fibrils or if the neighboring diseased neurons exerted some other toxic influence that caused young grafted neurons to form Lewy bodies.

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