Epigenetics -- Keeping Problematic Family Health Heritage at Bay

All too frequently we patients look to medical professionals to fix something that's already broken. We live lifestyles that move our bodies toward illness or injury, then we expect the doctor to prescribe that magic bullet to fix it.

That sure doesn't seem fair, does it?

On the same side of that coin is the way we look at our family history. Did you father die at a young age of a heart attack? Is it inevitable that you will, too? Or did your grandmother have osteoporosis and develop a dowager's hump because of it? Think that might happen to you? Are you 50 lbs overweight and chalking that up a genetic tendency to a slow metabolism?

Switching gears for a moment.... Yesterday I sat in on a series of classes devoted to integrative medicine which focused on evidence. I've written many times about how evidence is derived and how it can be used. So often the evidence is missing for the complementary and alternative aspects of integrative medicine.

One session was devoted to how knowledge of genetics, which stems from the Human Genome Project, can be applied to studying alternative and complementary therapies to provide the evidence that they do, or don't, work. And the upshot? A theory that perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing.

In fact, one of the new findings the Human Genome Project produced was a component of our genes which scientists are calling epigenetics. Too simply explained, epigenetics studies the part of an individual gene that turns on, or off, a trait of a gene, just like a switch.

For example: You may have inherited the tendency for very high cholesterol and hypertension. When you inherited those genes from either your mother or father (or both) you may have inherited them with the switch turned ON for those tendencies.

Here's the BIG deal about these switches, though. They can be switched to the other direction, turned on or off, through the way we live our lives. The idea, then, is that if your genetic switch is turned ON for high cholesterol or hypertension, then the right habits (eating well, exercising, avoiding animal fats, etc) may turn them off. Seriously. That's what is being studied now.

Returning to that question of complementary and alternative remedies, integrating with conventional medicine, and the lack of evidence for many of the alternative remedies -- scientists are considering that they may have been looking for the wrong kinds of evidence. In the future, epigenetics will play a larger role in that research.

But now, returning to the question about your family history -- and something WE can actually have some control over.... Since evidence shows that our lifestyle choices and habits may switch those switches, then yes, that means we need to take more responsibility for the choices we make, and stop relying on our doctors to provide that magic bullet. I can only imagine how disappointing that is!

If you want to understand epigenetics better, there is an excellent, easy to understand video, produced by the TV show Nova, and aired on PBS, now available online. It's about a 13 minute overview, and you'll find it fascinating. It includes information about Personalized Medicine, how we'll be treated in the future.

Not to mention the most interesting conversation you can have the next time your family sits around the dinner table. Please pass the veggies!
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