Familial hypercholesterolaemia workshop for leveraging point-of-care testing and personalised medicine in association with the Lipid and Atherosclerosis Society of Southern Africa.

Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) is a common autosomal dominantly inherited disorder in which impaired clearance of plasma low-density lipoprotein cholesterol causes premature atherosclerotic vascular disease and tendon xanthomata. This workshop aimed to consolidate information on the diagnosis and management of FH in South Africa. The genetic causes include mutations in the LDL receptor, apolipoprotein B100 and proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9).

Improving Interpretation of Cardiac Phenotypes and Enhancing Discovery With Expanded Knowledge in the Gene Ontology.

Background: A systems biology approach to cardiac physiology requires a comprehensive representation of how coordinated processes operate in the heart, as well as the ability to interpret relevant transcriptomic and proteomic experiments. The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium provides structured, controlled vocabularies of biological terms that can be used to summarize and analyze functional knowledge for gene products.

Methods And Results: In this study, we created a computational resource to facilitate genetic studies of cardiac physiology by integrating literature curation with attention to an improved and expanded ontological representation of heart processes in the Gene Ontology.

Discovery and replication of SNP-SNP interactions for quantitative lipid traits in over 60,000 individuals.

Background: The genetic etiology of human lipid quantitative traits is not fully elucidated, and interactions between variants may play a role. We performed a gene-centric interaction study for four different lipid traits: low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), total cholesterol (TC), and triglycerides (TG).

Results: Our analysis consisted of a discovery phase using a merged dataset of five different cohorts ( = 12,853 to  = 16,849 depending on lipid phenotype) and a replication phase with ten independent cohorts totaling up to 36,938 additional samples.

Marginal role for 53 common genetic variants in cardiovascular disease prediction.

Objective: We investigated discrimination and calibration of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk scores when genotypic was added to phenotypic information. The potential of genetic information for those at intermediate risk by a phenotype-based risk score was assessed.

Methods: Data were from seven prospective studies including 11 851 individuals initially free of CVD or diabetes, with 1444 incident CVD events over 10 years' follow-up.