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Updated: Feb 28, 2026
Bone Marrow Transplantation Procedures in Mice to Study Clonal Hematopoiesis
Published on: May 26, 2021
Clonal Hematopoiesis and Risk of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease
Siddhartha Jaiswal1, Pradeep Natarajan1, Alexander J Silver1
1From the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology, Brigham and Women's Hospital (S.J., A.J.S., M.M.) and Harvard Medical School (B.L.E.), the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital (E.S.) and Harvard Medical School (G.K.S., P.L.), the Department of Pathology (S.J.) and the Center for Genomic Medicine (P.N., S.K.), Massachusetts General Hospital, the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, and Cardiovascular Research Center (P.N., S.K.), and the Department of Medicine (A.G.B.), Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and the Departments of Medical Oncology (C.J.G.) and Biostatistics and Computational Biology (D.N.), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, and the Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (P.N., A.G.B., N.G., S.G., S.K.) - all in Massachusetts; the Department of Cardiology, University Hospital, Parma, Italy (D.A.); the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York (U.B., R.M., V.F.); Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III, Madrid (V.F.); Medical Research Council-British Heart Foundation Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit and National Institute for Health Research Blood and Transplant Research Unit in Donor Health and Genomics, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, and the British Heart Foundation, Cambridge Centre of Excellence, Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (J.D.), and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton (J.D.) - both in the United Kingdom; the Center for Non-Communicable Diseases, Karachi, Pakistan (P.F., D.S.); the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (D.S.); and the Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö, Lund University, Lund, Sweden (O.M.).
Background:
Clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), which is defined as the presence of an expanded somatic blood-cell clone in persons without other hematologic abnormalities, is common among older persons and is associated with an increased risk of hematologic cancer. We previously found preliminary evidence for an association between CHIP and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, but the nature of this association was unclear.
Methods:
We used whole-exome sequencing to detect the presence of CHIP in peripheral-blood cells and associated such presence with coronary heart disease using samples from four case-control studies that together enrolled 4726 participants with coronary heart disease and 3529 controls. To assess causality, we perturbed the function of Tet2, the second most commonly mutated gene linked to clonal hematopoiesis, in the hematopoietic cells of atherosclerosis-prone mice.
Results:
In nested case-control analyses from two prospective cohorts, carriers of CHIP had a risk of coronary heart disease that was 1.9 times as great as in noncarriers (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.4 to 2.7). In two retrospective case-control cohorts for the evaluation of early-onset myocardial infarction, participants with CHIP had a risk of myocardial infarction that was 4.0 times as great as in noncarriers (95% CI, 2.4 to 6.7). Mutations in DNMT3A, TET2, ASXL1, and JAK2 were each individually associated with coronary heart disease. CHIP carriers with these mutations also had increased coronary-artery calcification, a marker of coronary atherosclerosis burden. Hypercholesterolemia-prone mice that were engrafted with bone marrow obtained from homozygous or heterozygous Tet2 knockout mice had larger atherosclerotic lesions in the aortic root and aorta than did mice that had received control bone marrow. Analyses of macrophages from Tet2 knockout mice showed elevated expression of several chemokine and cytokine genes that contribute to atherosclerosis.
Conclusions:
The presence of CHIP in peripheral-blood cells was associated with nearly a doubling in the risk of coronary heart disease in humans and with accelerated atherosclerosis in mice. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health and others.).
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