Genome-wide Association Studies of Myocardial Infarction in the Saudi Arabian cohort

Myocardial infarction (MI) remain a major health issue despite major advances in the understanding of the pathophysiological mechanism, genetic architecture, and treatment of disease. It is well recognized that life-style factors that play into established risk factors such as a high BMI, Type 2 Diabetes, and high blood lipid levels, contribute significantly to the risk for disease. Programs aimed at changing such lifestyles are promising but would benefit from accurate selection of people at high risk for disease. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) derived from previous large GWAS studies have demonstrated clinical utility for risk stratification of the vulnerable population. Unfortunately, such large studies have been focused on Western European populations and it remains unclear how portable these risk scores are across populations. Therefore, we performed a GWAS for MI and linked comorbidities in a Saudi Arabian cohort.