BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Inflaming cardiovascular passions

February 24, 2011 8:00 AM UTC

Ever since a 2007 genomewide association study uncovered a region of chromosome 9 as a major player in determining risk for cardiovascular diseases, researchers have struggled to understand how locus 9p21 actually causes disease. Now, researchers have found that the locus causes an aberrant inflammatory response that leads to misregulation of a handful of genes away from 9p21 itself.1

As a risk factor for coronary artery disease (CAD), "there's no locus or biomarker as important as 9p21 aside from low-density lipoprotein levels," said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and chief academic officer of Scripps Health. "We previously knew from 20-some studies and 100,000-plus people that it was important, but we didn't know what it was doing."...