Genetic Identification for Non-Communicable Disease: Findings from 20 Years of the Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study

Context: Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study (TLGS), a longitudinal family based cohort study, is the oldest and largest longitudinal family based study in Iran, aimed at investigating effects of environmental, social and biological factors on the health of Tehranians over time. Considering the importance of genetic studies in this aspect, here we present a summary of the important genetic findings, and the potentiality of their contributions to future related projects. Evidence Acquisition: For all related studies during the past 20 years the search sources were all prominent search engines such as PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar with the most proper Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Results: This review summarizes associations of 6 binary phenotypes and 17 quantitative traits with genetic markers in 26 genes. Of the 47 genetic markers, studied most were related to cardio metabolic risk factors. Results of heritability and linkage analysis were also collected and the highest heritability was found to be related to HDL-C (0.5). Conclusion: Considering the opportunity provided by large-scale cohort studies to investigate molecular effects of genetic variants on causality and different omics’ data, genetic studies conducted on TLGS population have had a remarkable success in identifying genetic variants that facilitating a unique genetic database on Iranian populations. The results of genome wide association studies in this population are currently facilitating investigations to define the Iranian genetic differences with other population.