Contribution of Rare and Common Genetic Variants to Plasma Lipid Levels and Carotid Stiffness and Geometry: A Substudy of the Paris Prospective Study 3.

Background: We assess the contribution of common and rare putatively functional genetic variants (most of them coding) present on the Illumina exome Beadchip to the variability of plasma lipids and stiffness of the common carotid artery.

Methods And Results: Measurements were obtained from 2283 men and 1398 women, and after filtering and exclusion of monomorphic variants, 32,827 common (minor allele frequency >0.01) and 68,770 rare variants were analyzed.