The impact of genome-wide association studies on the pathophysiology and therapy of cardiovascular disease

Funding Information: This work was supported by grants from the Fondation Leducq (CADgenomics: Understanding CAD Genes, 12CVD02), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of the e: Med research and funding concept (e:AtheroSysMed, grant 01ZX1313A-2014) and the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. HEALTH-F2-2013-601456 (CVgenes-at-target). Further grants were received from the DFG as part of the Sonderforschungsbereich CRC 1123 (B2). T.K. was supported by a DZHK Rotation Grant. Figures and contain modified image material available at Servier Medical Art under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Publisher Copyright: © 2016 The Authors. Published under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license Copyright: Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Cardiovascular diseases are leading causes for death worldwide. Genetic disposition jointly with traditional risk factors precipitates their manifestation. Whereas the implications of a positive family history for individual risk have been known for a long time, only in the past few years have genome-wide association studies (GWAS) shed light on the underlying genetic variations. Here, we review these studies designed to increase our understanding of the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases, particularly coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction. We focus on the newly established pathways to exemplify the translation from the identification of risk-related genetic variants to new preventive and therapeutic strategies for cardiovascular disease.publishersversionPeer reviewe