Variants associated with coronary artery disease

Genetic variants associated with coronary artery disease are reported in a study published this week in Nature Genetics. Coronary artery disease is a major cause of mortality worldwide.

Panos Deloukas and colleagues report a large-scale association analysis for coronary artery disease in 63,746 cases and 130,681 controls, using a custom genotyping and fine-mapping array. They identify 15 genomic regions associated with coronary artery disease. This brings the number of reported susceptibility loci to 46, and the authors estimate that together these explain ~10.6% of coronary artery disease heritability. Their network analysis suggests the involvement of pathways in lipid metabolism and inflammation in the susceptibility to coronary artery disease.