Fine-mapping of retinal vascular complexity loci identifies Notch regulation as a shared mechanism with myocardial infarction outcomes

There is increasing evidence that the complexity of the retinal vasculature measured as fractal dimension, D_f, might offer earlier insights into the progression of coronary artery disease (CAD) before traditional biomarkers can be detected. This association could be partly explained by a common genetic basis; however, the genetic component of D_f is poorly understood. We present a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 38,000 individuals with white British ancestry from the UK Biobank aimed to comprehensively study the genetic component of D_f and analyse its relationship with CAD. We replicated 5 D_f loci and found 4 additional loci with suggestive significance ( P  < 1e−05) to contribute to D_f variation, which previously were reported in retinal tortuosity and complexity, hypertension, and CAD studies. Significant negative genetic correlation estimates support the inverse relationship between D_f and CAD, and between D_f and myocardial infarction (MI), one of CAD’s fatal outcomes. Fine-mapping of D_f loci revealed Notch signalling regulatory variants supporting a shared mechanism with MI outcomes. We developed a predictive model for MI incident cases, recorded over a 10-year period following clinical and ophthalmic evaluation, combining clinical information, D_f, and a CAD polygenic risk score. Internal cross-validation demonstrated a considerable improvement in the area under the curve (AUC) of our predictive model (AUC = 0.770 ± 0.001) when comparing with an established risk model, SCORE, (AUC = 0.741 ± 0.002) and extensions thereof leveraging the PRS (AUC = 0.728 ± 0.001). This evidences that D_f provides risk information beyond demographic, lifestyle, and genetic risk factors. Our findings shed new light on the genetic basis of D_f, unveiling a common control with MI, and highlighting the benefits of its application in individualised MI risk prediction. A genome-wide association study finds an inverse relationship between progression of coronary artery disease and retinal vasculature’s complexity measured as fractal dimension, and validates a predictive model for myocardial infarction.