Genome-Wide Association Study of Cardiac Structure and Systolic Function in African Americans

Background—Using data from 4 community-based cohorts of African Americans, we tested the association between genome-wide markers (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) and cardiac phenotypes in the Candidate-gene Association Resource study. Methods and Results—Among 6765 African Americans, we related age, sex, height, and weight-adjusted residuals for 9 cardiac phenotypes (assessed by echocardiogram or magnetic resonance imaging) to 2.5 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms genotyped using Genome-wide Affymetrix Human SNP Array 6.0 (Affy6.0) and the remainder imputed. Within the cohort, genome-wide association analysis was conducted, followed by meta-analysis across cohorts using inverse variance weights (genome-wide significance threshold=4.0 ×10−7). Supplementary pathway analysis was performed. We attempted replication in 3 smaller cohorts of African ancestry and tested lookups in 1 consortium of European ancestry (EchoGEN). Across the 9 phenotypes, variants in 4 genetic loci reached genome-wide significan...