![]() ![]() Prof al-Suwaidi said: "The study will have two areas of major clinical importance.įirst, it will aid in the primary risk stratification for coronary heart disease to identify high risk individuals based on their genetic risk. We were successful in validating known genes, previously discovered in Europeans, and finding potentially novel genes that may be specific to Qataris/Arabs." Senior Research Scientist at the Qatar Centre for Artificial Intelligence group at QCRI Dr Mohamed Saad explained that huge amounts of data had to be analysed for this study: "We studied more than 100mn genetic markers across the DNA with the aim of identifying genes that differ between coronary heart disease patients and healthy Qatari individuals. This factor highlights the importance of the study in advancing genomic studies for the regions populations. In genomic medicine, Arab and Middle Eastern populations are among the least studied, so there is little knowledge about the causes of many complex diseases. While many researchers study the genetic causes, the focus has been on patients of European origin. Globally, coronary heart disease is one of the leading causes of death and its risk factors include lifestyle, environmental, and genetic factors. The project also received support from Qatar National Research Fund. The sequencing of the patients was funded by Qatar Genome Programme while the healthy controls were extracted from Qatar Biobank. Study patients were recruited through the Qatar Cardiovascular Biorepository (QCbio) initiative, led by Prof Jassim al-Suwaidi, Director of Cardiovascular Research at HMC. ![]() The study is the first and largest disease-centric study in Qatar, the Middle East, and North Africa region that sheds light on the genetic architecture of coronary heart disease using whole genome sequencing. Their study, titled "Validation of Polygenic Risk Scores for Coronary Heart Disease in a Middle Eastern Cohort Using Whole Genome Sequencing", was published in Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine on Oct 12. Researchers at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Hamad Medical Corp (HMC), and the Mayo Clinic in the United States, have shown that polygenic risk scores - the estimate of an individuals genetic risk towards a disease - have a good predictive power for coronary heart disease in Qataris. ![]()
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