Word: proteins
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...levels of c-reactive protein, or CRP--who knows? My doctor didn't test for it, and it didn't occur to me to ask. But two reports in last week's New England Journal of Medicine suggest that CRP may be just as important a risk factor for coronary-artery disease and heart attacks as LDL--and maybe more so. Does that mean I should have had the test? Not on the basis of what was known then. But now things are different...
...protein secreted by the liver in response to inflammation, and over the past several years it has become apparent to experts that inflammation is a big part of heart disease. CRP seems to play a role in damaging artery walls, making them more prone to the buildup of fatty plaques that can rupture and block the vessels that feed the heart. Sure enough, studies have shown that high CRP levels, signaling active inflammation, are associated with heart problems...
...hard to keep that from happening. If salt content is too high, the body's water content will be elevated too. The system responds by slowing down the manufacture of renin, an enzyme that increases water retention. Dialing back the renin also dials back the production of angiotensin, a protein that constricts blood vessels. Should the salt level fall too far, the body reverses the procedure, cranking up renin to hold on to water and releasing angiotensin to tighten vessels. There are a lot of things that can throw that system off, including kidney disease and tumors on the thyroid...
...beta-blockers, which moderate heart rate and the angiotensin system; calcium-channel blockers, which obstruct the tiny ducts in cells through which calcium ions must pass to constrict blood vessels; ACE inhibitors, which reduce the production of angiotensin and thus reduce constriction; and angiotensin-receptor blockers, which allow the protein to be produced but prevent some of it from being taken up by the cells. All four of these have the same goal--to unclench the tensed circulatory system--and they are often prescribed in combination...
...Dahiyat wanted to show that he could make a V-shaped protein with a coil falling off the top of one arm. His Caltech colleagues laughed, but off he went to the supercomputer at Caltech's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I said, here's the shape I want to make, tell us the sequence,'' he recalls. By the end of the day, the computer gave him billions of possible amino acid combinations and recommended the best one. Dahiyat threw that sequence into a small, tunnel-like device called an NMR spectrometer. About a minute later, Dahiyat noticed that...