Researchers at the University of Virginia and Uppsala University tested whether that loss was truly harmless. They bred mice whose blood-forming cells carried no Y chromosome at all, then tracked what happened to the animals' hearts as they aged.
The mice developed stiffened, fibrotic heart muscle and died earlier than normal mice. In blood samples from the UK Biobank, men who had lost the Y chromosome in more than 40 percent of their white blood cells carried a 31 percent higher risk of dying from circulatory disease.
An antibody that blocked a fibrosis-promoting growth factor eased the heart dysfunction in the affected mice, pointing to a specific, treatable mechanism rather than a vague marker of old age. Loss of the Y chromosome turns up in a large share of older men's blood cells, and the findings reframe it as a likely contributor to heart disease that doctors had mostly filed away as noise.
Read the original study
Sano et al., Science, 2022 · doi.org/10.1126/science.abn3100
A missing chromosome, a damaged heart.
Source
- Sano, S., Horitani, K., Ogawa, H., Halvardson, J., Chavkin, N. W., Wang, Y., Sano, M., Mattisson, J., Hata, A., Danielsson, M., Miura-Yura, E., Zaghlool, A., Evans, M. A., Fall, T., De Hoyos, H. N., Sundström, J., Yura, Y., Kour, A., Arai, Y., . . . Walsh, K. (2022). Hematopoietic loss of Y chromosome leads to cardiac fibrosis and heart failure mortality. Science, 377(6603), 292–297. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn3100