🫀 The Spleen–Heart Axis: Could the spleen hold a missing clue to coronary artery disease?

🫀 Could the spleen hold a missing clue to coronary artery disease?

Kamineni et al. used deep learning to extract 107 splenic MRI features in >42,000 UK Biobank participants. 🔬 Ten were associated with CAD, while genomics identified 219 loci—including the enigmatic 9p21 CAD locus. 🧬

The intriguing message: splenic texture—not simply size—may reflect a hematopoietic–inflammatory–genetic axis underlying CAD.

⚠️ External clinical replication was limited, so this is mechanistic discovery, not yet a clinical risk tool.