Washington, July 27 : People are more likely to inherit the risk of having a heart attack than the risk of having a stroke, according to a new research.

"We found that the association between one of your parents having a heart attack and you having a heart attack was a lot stronger than the association between your parent having a stroke and you having a stroke," said senior author Peter M. Rothwell, M. D., Ph. D., professor of clinical neurology at Oxford University in England.

"That suggests the susceptibility to stroke is less strongly inherited than the susceptibility to heart attack."

The researchers used data from 906 patients (604 men) with acute heart ailments and 1,015 patients (484 men) who suffered acute cerebral events. Among the study''s findings:

In the heart patients, 30 percent had one parent who''d had a heart attack, 21 percent had at least one sibling who had suffered a heart attack. Seven percent had two or more siblings who had heart attacks and 5 percent had two parents with heart attack.

Among the patients with a stroke or transient ischemic attacks (TIAs, often called a mini-strokes or warning strokes), 21 percent had one parent who had a stroke, and 2 percent had two parents with stroke.

The risk for an acute cardiac event was six times greater if both parents had suffered a heart attack and one-and-a-half times greater if one parent had a heart attack. In contrast, the likelihood of stroke did not change significantly with parents'' stroke history.

The study has been published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, an American Heart Association journal. (ANI)