What causes cardiac amyloidosis?

What causes cardiac amyloidosis?

Different types of amyloidosis happen for different reasons, but most of them involve your DNA.

DNA is much like a family cookbook, containing instructions for your cells on how to work and make certain proteins. Passing DNA from parents to children is like if your parents worked together to make your very own handwritten copy of that cookbook.

Genetic mutations are just typos in your DNA cookbook, and a big enough typo can ruin a recipe. That’s exactly what happens with diseases like amyloidosis. Your cells are doing their best, but they only know how to follow the recipe. These typos can happen to you in two different ways.

Inherited

Cardiac amyloidosis is often familial, meaning you inherited it. This happens when one or both of your parents’ DNA has a mutation and that error in their version of the “cookbook” gets copied over to yours.

Acquired

Acquired conditions are ones that you don’t inherit, meaning you develop them at some point in your life. Wild-type ATTR amyloidosis and dialysis-related amyloidosis are both examples of acquired conditions, but neither of them involves mutations in your DNA.

• Wild-type ATTR amyloidosis happens because your body makes the proteins correctly, but the proteins become unstable over time (which is why this condition is so heavily tied to your age). Eventually, the protein misfolds on its own.
• Dialysis-related amyloidosis happens because your body has too much of a normal protein that dialysis — unlike your kidneys — can’t filter out. Over time, that protein accumulates to the point where it starts to cause problems.