Approved Research

The discovery and validation of Genetic association between blood characteristics and the risk of coronary artery disease.

Lay summary

Aim: The aim of this project is to identify the risk factors for coronary artery disease, which is one of the leading causes of death in the world. More specifically, this project aims to quantify the risk of the factors that were disregarded or under the controversy.

Scientific rationale: Identified risk factors for diseases can be a target to modulate by changing one's lifestyle or taking medicine to reduce the risk of disease occurrence and severity. The risk factor can be identified by comparing the genetic mutation and clinical characteristics of healthy people and disease patients. And so far, the blood lipid levels itself and genetic mutations associated with the blood lipid level have identified as one of the major risk factors for coronary artery disease. However, complex diseases such as coronary artery disease can be affected by many factors although mild, and the effects may be increased if the mild effects of a number of factors are combined. Therefore, it is also important to find risk factors even though the size of the effect is small. In this context, this project aims to measure the risk for coronary disease of the factors registered in UK-BioBank and compare the degree of risk among the factors, especially focusing on the factors that have been considered as having small effects or unknown.

Project duration: The duration of this project will be three years, from 2020 to 2023.

Public health impact:  The result of this project may provide a list of factors for the prevention and treatment of disease.