The heart SNPs a beat: polymorphisms in candidate genes for cardiovascular disease.

Several environmental risk factors of cardiovascular disease are well established, but genetic risk alleles contributing to the disease in the general population are hotly debated. New strategies focusing on polymorphism discovery in candidate disease genes followed by tests of association to genes across the genome offer a pioneering approach to identifying risk alleles. Several hundred candidate genes for cardiovascular disease have been screened for common polymorphisms and these variants may provide susceptibility alleles which largely contribute to risk of cardiovascular disease in the general population. However, the impact of common susceptibility alleles for disease management will depend on many years of future investigation.