An international analysis of 14 genome-wide association studies involving over 100,000 patients has identified 13 new genetic risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD).

Muredach P. Reilly, MBBCH, MSCE, associate professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and colleagues played a central organizing role in the international consortium, CARDIoGRAM (Coronary Artery Disease Genome-wide Replication and Meta-analysis), that combined and analyzed data from all currently published genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on heart attack and CAD, as well as some unpublished data. The data include more than 22,000 patients, 60,000 healthy individuals, and 45,000 additional subjects, meaning CARDIoGRAM is ten times bigger than the largest previous study. By pooling all of the published and unpublished data, they sought to make discoveries that might have been overlooked. The study is published online this week in Nature Genetics.

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