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05/01/2008: "Genes Explain Race Disparity in Response to a Heart Drug"

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. It is almost as if they were immune to the drugs.

Now researchers at Washington University and the University of Maryland have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. People with this altered gene are making what amounts to their own version of beta blockers all the time. As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report.

[ It is far from the only observable racial difference in reactions to medicine. ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/health/research/29heart.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1209614400&en=336577f1089edce7&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin