High heritability of ascending aortic diameter and trans-ancestry prediction of thoracic aortic disease
Disease areas:
heart and blood vessels
Last updated:
Author(s):
Goncalo Abecasis, Aris Baras, Michael Cantor, Giovanni Coppola, Andrew Deubler, Aris Economides, Katia Karalis, Luca A. Lotta, John D. Overton, Jeffrey G. Reid, Katherine Siminovitch, Alan Shuldiner, Christina Beechert, Caitlin Forsythe, Erin D. Fuller, Zhenhua Gu, Michael Lattari, Alexander Lopez, Maria Sotiopoulos Padilla, Manasi Pradhan, Kia Manoochehri, Thomas D. Schleicher, Louis Widom, Sarah E. Wolf, Ricardo H. Ulloa, Amelia Averitt, Nilanjana Banerjee, Dadong Li, Sameer Malhotra, Deepika Sharma, Jeffrey C. Staples, Xiaodong Bai, Suganthi Balasubramanian, Suying Bao, Boris Boutkov, Siying Chen, Gisu Eom, Lukas Habegger, Alicia Hawes, Shareef Khalid, Olga Krasheninina, Rouel Lanche, Adam J. Mansfield, Evan K. Maxwell, George Mitra, Mona Nafde, Sean O'Keeffe, Max Orelus, Razvan Panea, Tommy Polanco, Ayesha Rasool, William Salerno, Kathie Sun, Jiwen Xin, Joshua Backman, Amy Damask, Lee Dobbyn, Manuel Allen Revez Ferreira, Arkopravo Ghosh, Christopher Gillies, Lauren Gurski, Eric Jorgenson, Hyun Min Kang, Michael Kessler, Jack Kosmicki, Alexander Li, Nan Lin, Daren Liu, Adam Locke, Jonathan Marchini, Anthony Marcketta, Joelle Mbatchou, Arden Moscati, Charles Paulding, Carlo Sidore, Eli Stahl, Kyoko Watanabe, Bin Ye, Blair Zhang, Andrey Ziyatdinov, Marcus B. Jones, Jason Mighty, Lyndon J. Mitnaul
Enlargement of the aorta is an important risk factor for aortic aneurysm and dissection, a leading cause of morbidity in the developed world. Here we performed automated extraction of ascending aortic diameter from cardiac magnetic resonance images of 36,021 individuals from the UK Biobank, followed by genome-wide association. We identified lead variants across 41 loci, including genes related to cardiovascular development (HAND2, TBX20) and Mendelian forms of thoracic aortic disease (ELN, FBN1). A polygenic score significantly predicted prevalent risk of thoracic aortic aneurysm and the need for surgical intervention for patients with thoracic aneurysm across multiple ancestries within the UK Biobank, FinnGen, the Penn Medicine Biobank and the Million Veterans Program (MVP). Additionally, we highlight the primary causal role of blood pressure in reducing aortic dilation using Mendelian randomization. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for using genetic determinants of human anatomy to understand cardiovascular development while improving prediction of diseases of the thoracic aorta.
We aim to better understand the contribution of genetic factors to variation in normal heart structure and to look for genes and genetic variation which…
This proposal seeks access to UK Biobank data to support efforts to generate effect therapeutic hypotheses from genomic and hospital in-patient data. We have developed…
