Abstract

Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) is characterized by chronic asymptomatic dilatation of the aorta and aortic rupture, an event with a mortality of approximately 75%. Unlike other forms of cardiovascular diseases, there has been limited success in the use of pharmacological treatments to alter the natural history of the disease but such a treatment would be desirable as aortic repair comes with considerable morbidity, mortality and expense.

The causal risk factors for AAA have proved elusive, in part due a relative paucity of high quality prospective studies focusing upon this phenotype. We have used GWAS and Mendelian Randomization to determine potential causal pathways in AAA and study heterogeneity of genetic association results across different cardiovascular diseases. This seminar will cover this work and our evaluation of inflammatory and lipid based pathways in AAA pathogenesis. It will also report the progress in the development of large-scale population based studies to investigate the pathways involved in AAA progression and/or rupture.