New study connects religiosity in U.S. South Asians with cardiovascular disease

The Stress, Spirituality and Health Study (SSSH), a cutting-edge proteomic analysis, suggests that religious beliefs modulate the expression of proteins associated with cardiovascular disease in South Asians in the United States. The research, published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) in Scientific Reports, shows that spiritual struggles, in particular, significantly modify the impact of unique proteins on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) in South Asians in the United States, a community that has particularly high rates of CVD.

This study represents the first proteomic analysis ever conducted on protein levels in relation to CVD in a population in southern Asia in the USA and the first published study to analyze proteomic signatures in relation to religion and spirituality in any population.

“Before we can develop the best interventions to reduce CVD disparities, we need to understand the biological pathways through which health disparities are produced,” says the study’s lead investigator and senior co-author Alexandra Shields, Ph.D., director of Harvard / MGH Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities at MGH Mongan Institute and associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “As this study shows, psychosocial factors – and religious or spiritual struggles in particular – can affect the biological processes that lead to CVD in this high-risk population. Spirituality can also serve as a resource for resilience and have a protective effect. minority communities that experience higher levels of CVD also report higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, studies such as SSSH can help identify new leverage points, such as psychotherapy with a spiritual focus for those in spiritual distress, which can reduce the risk of CVD for such individuals. “

The results of the study, which included 50 participants who developed CVD and 50 controls matched for sex and age without CVD from the South American Atherosclerosis Mediator Study (MASALA) (100 participants), indicate that there may be unique protein associated expression profiles with CVD in South Asian populations in the United States, and that these associations may also be affected by religious struggles, in which, for example, individuals experiencing adverse events in life feel they are being punished or abandoned by their God, or have a faith crisis. The MASALA study includes 1,164 South Asians who were recruited in the San Francisco Bay area and the Chicago metropolitan area and followed up for approximately eight years with the aim of investigating the factors leading to heart disease in this high-risk ethnic group. MASALA is one of the original cohorts participating in the SSSH, through which this research was carried out.

“Understanding the pathways of this mechanism at the molecular level using proteomics technology is crucial for the development of potential interventions that can help reduce the incidence of CVD in this population,” said Long H. Ngo, Ph.D., lead author and co-director of Biostatistics at the General Medicine Division of the BIDMC and associate professor of Medicine at HMS.

Senior co-author Towia Libermann, Ph.D., director of the Center for Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at BIDMC, adds: “The types of blood-based protein biomarkers used in this study are particularly effective in CVD risk assessment because they carry clinical information about disease risk and are the most commonly used molecules for diagnostic applications. ”