A Multi-omics Study of "Healthy" Premature CAD Patients

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain the leading cause of global mortality despite continuous efforts in disease prevention and treatment optimization. In 2022 alone, CVD caused an estimated 19.8 million deaths worldwide, and ischemic heart disease had the highest global age-standardized DALYs of all diseases at 2,275.9 per 100,000. Therefore, research on the etiology and pathogenesis of coronary artery disease (CAD) remains first priority. It is now widely known that risk factors such as diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, smoking, and obesity are closely related to CAD, but they only explain 30%-40% of CAD risk factors, and large-sample cohort and twin studies have concluded that CAD heritability is estimated to be 40% to 60%. With the development of the Human Genome Project and high-throughput sequencing technology, in the past decade, increasingly larger genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been conducted worldwide and biobanks established. Public sequencing data is increasingly being used as external common controls instead of sequencing new controls in every study. Till now, thousands of mutations related to CAD have been identified. Multiple Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) have been developed to improve the prediction of common, complex cardiovascular diseases like CAD on individual level. Premature CAD has been proved to have strong link with family history of cardiovascular and cerebral vascular disease, which indicates a strong genetic background of premature CAD. However, there is an even more scarce \& inconspicuous subgroup of premature CAD, defined as premature CAD without common CAD risk factors in this study. First of all, most of those patients were considered "healthy" or "at very low risk of CVDs" before CAD was diagnosed; secondly, genetic risk factors \& metabolic fingerprints of such patients remain unknown; thirdly, we still don't know yet how to optimize current primary prevention strategy for this rare CAD subgroup. For this regard, we designed this multi-omics study to cover the questions mentioned above.