Intermountain Press Release

Salt Lake City—Heart researchers at Intermountain Healthcare's LDS Hospital on Wednesday will launch a new tool that may lead to exciting new discoveries in the fight against heart disease, the Western World's number one killer.

Researchers at LDS Hospital on Wednesday will launch the Intermountain Genealogical Registry, a lineage-based population database containing the pedigrees of more than 10 million individuals - the largest in the United States - who have lived or whose descendants have lived in the Intermountain Region of the United States. The purpose of this groundbreaking new database is to enhance the discovery of genetic factors that contribute to cardiovascular diseases through the study of a large population of patients in which cardiovascular diseases appear to cluster in certain families.

LDS Hospital heart researchers hope the database and subsequent studies of families will lead to improved treatment for heart patients through genetic testing to guide prevention, disease diagnosis, and personalized medical care for patients with heart disease.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the U.S. It's estimated that more than 70 million Americans have at least one form of heart disease.

The Intermountain Genealogical Registry at LDS Hospital has been constructed from publicly-available genealogical records for which the pedigree connections are linked. It is record-linked to Intermountain Healthcare's rich clinical resource of electronic health information, making it a tool unique in the world for the discovery of the genetic factors underlying human health and heart disease in the general population.

"A large genealogy connected to clinical records will allow for the identification of families where the clustering of a disease is not simply due to chance, eliminating a great source of wasted effort that can make family-based genetic studies cost-ineffective and impractical in cardiovascular research. The Intermountain Genealogical Registry will make cardiovascular genetic research more effective and efficient," says LDS Hospital cardiovascular clinical epidemiologist Benjamin Horne.

Researchers says the new registry will help speed the discovery of genetic risk factors and enhance subsequent medical care for patients in the near future.

"The cardiovascular diseases we study, such as coronary disease, heart attacks, and valve diseases are complex diseases that may have many genes that contribute to them," says Brent Muhlestein, M.D., director of cardiovascular research at LDS Hospital. "If we limit studies to only a few families, we may only find rare genetic variants that only occur in those families, whereas with a population genealogy such as the one we are instituting at LDS Hospital, we can find many different families who are unrelated so we can find common genetic factors that contribute to the common occurrence of these diseases."

LDS Hospital researchers have been working on the Intermountain Genealogical Registry for the past four years. While the registry now has the pedigree records of more than 10 million individuals, patients participating in cardiovascular medical research at LDS Hospital will continually be added to the database.

"Ultimately, the purpose of the genealogy project is to help us find the genetic factors physicians need to consider when they are trying to prevent disease and attempting to diagnose and treat disease," says Horne. "We also hope to find genetic factors that contribute to exceptional longevity or good health that could be utilized for those who don't have those factors, either in prevention efforts and health education, or in development of treatments that would provide the proteins the good-health genes provide. I expect to spend the rest of my career working on this project and expect that it will outlast me."