Description
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cardiovascular disease and the leading cause of death worldwide. To date, the 9p21.3 locus is the most robust and frequently replicated risk locus of CAD among >90 CAD risk loci identified by GWAS. More than 50 CAD-associated genomic variants were identified at the 9p21.3 CAD locus and many of them are located within a long non-coding gene ANRIL, which was initially referred to as Antisense Non-coding RNA in INK4 Locus. The causal role of ANRIL in CAD and the underlying molecular mechanism are unknown.