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Center for Common Disease Genomics [CCDG] - Cardiovascular: TexGen

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), especially coronary heart disease, heart failure and cerebrovascular disease remain the leading causes of death in men and women across all race groups in the United States. Substantial evidence exists for genetic factors underlying CVD risk, and their discovery offers an opportunity to enhance understanding of disease mechanisms, to provide specific diagnostic and prognostic indicators, and to identify novel therapeutic targets. The Centers for Common Disease Genomics (CCDG) are a large-scale genome sequencing effort undertaken as a collaboration to identify rare risk and protective alleles for common chronic diseases, with a current focus on early onset heart disease, hemorrhagic stroke, and autism. In this study, whole genome sequencing (WGS) was performed in 6,146 individuals with any personal or family history of CVD from the TexGen study who were recruited from several institutions in the Texas Medical Center located in Houston, Texas. The participants included patients who were admitted with a variety of diagnoses including acute coronary syndromes, strokes, and transient ischemic attacks, or who underwent percutaneous coronary interventions or coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) (Virani SS et al. Am J Cardiology 107:1504-1509, 2011). Patients in the TexGen cohort with a confirmed diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) or CABG when discharged from the hospital between 2001-2008 were eligible for a follow-up study of recurrent myocardial infarction (Virani SS et al. Circulation J 76:950-956, 2012), while those presenting with ACS beginning in 2007 were recruited for an investigation of the role of depressive symptoms in the risk of major adverse coronary events (Sanner J et al. Biol Res Nurs 20:168-176, 2018). In addition, the initial criterion for enrollment in a third TexGen sub-study undertaken between 2007 and 2013 was the occurrence of premature acute myocardial infarction in men ≤ 50 years and women ≤ 55 years in order to establish a blood sample collection resource with the intention of localizing genes that contribute to disease risk. This definition was later expanded to include individuals with a clinical history of premature coronary heart disease such as CABG or percutaneous coronary interventions.