Genetic risk factors of cardiovascular disease

Atherosclerosis has a multifactorial origin involving abnormalities in lipid metabolism, hypertension, obesity, diabetes mellitus, smoking, inflammation, coagulation, and fibrinolysis, amongst others. At present, we lack a complete understanding of the relevance of these individual risk factors and their interplay in the disease process. It has been suggested that genetic factors contribute to the risk of CVD.
The main aim of this thesis was to find new genetic risk factors for CVD, by using different analysis methods using new and existing publicly available data.
In this thesis, we have identified new variants with small effects associated with lipid levels in a large meta-analysis of 66,240 individuals from 32 different studies.
Unfortunately, we did not find an association between GRS of common variants with small effects on CVD and the number of events in a cohort of FH patients and a cohort of patients treated with statins. By using publicly available GWAS data we found that TG, LP(a), CAC and plaque are associated with CVD. We feel that sharing and combining datasets by making (summary-level) data publicly available for further research will contribute to the discovery of new (genetic) risk factors of CVD.