Gene polymorphisms and the risk of myocardial infarction - An emerging relation

Today, a person's genetic background is considered in every aspect of clinical medicine, ranging from susceptibility to diseases, pathogenesis, and clinical outcome to diversity in responses to drug treatment (pharmacogenomics). The new panoramic look at the human genome has stimulated a massive search for clinically relevant genomic information, including single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which consist of substitutions of one nucleotide for another in a DNA sequence. Individual genomes are 99.9 percent identical, with only 0.1 percent of the genome showing polymorphisms.1,2 About 2 million or 3 million SNPs have been found in exonic, intronic, regulatory, and intergenic regions. Almost all . . .