New approaches to establish genetic causality

Cardiovascular medicine has evolved rapidly in the era of genomics with many diseases having primary genetic origins becoming the subject of intense investigation. The resulting avalanche of information on the molecular causes of these disorders has prompted a revolution in our understanding of disease mechanisms and provided new avenues for diagnoses. At the heart of this revolution is the need to correctly classify genetic variants discovered during the course of research or reported from clinical genetic testing. This review will address current concepts related to establishing the cause and effect relationship between genomic variants and heart diseases. A survey of general approaches used for functional annotation of variants will also be presented.