Hardly any other disease has been the focus of medical and biochemical research for decades as much as arteriosclerosis. The problem with this widespread disease of the arterial system is that it develops in childhood, remains asymptomatic for decades, and often only manifests clinically in middle adulthood, and then completely unexpectedly, as a heart attack (coronary heart disease, CHD), a stroke (cerebrovascular disease, vascular dementia), or an acute occlusion of extremity arteries (peripheral arterial occlusive disease, PAOD). Cardiovascular diseases resulting from arteriosclerosis have long been among the most common causes of death in Germany and Western industrialized nations. Due to the often long-term chronic course, they represent a significant share of the growing morbidity and thus the socioeconomic burden in health care and healthcare. According to the Federal Statistical Office, there were 358,684 deaths in Germany from diseases of the circulatory system in 2007. Due to the aging of the population, the social and socioeconomic impacts will become even more relevant in the future, particularly due to the sometimes long-term chronic course of cardiovascular diseases. Qualified research into the origins, progression, and treatment and prevention options therefore remains urgently required. In recent years, research findings, particularly in the field of genetics, have found their way into clinical research. High-throughput technologies now facilitate the identification of genetic, genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic markers of atherosclerosis, which will play an important role in risk algorithms for predicting complications, e.g. the Framingham risk score, in the medium term. However, potential new risk markers, such as genetic or proteomic markers, require the same level of care in identification and validation as traditional epidemiological markers. Due to the successes in this area and current efforts to implement these in health research, societal aspects, the prevention of arteriosclerosis, and patient care will gain even more importance in the future. The aim of the project is to identify new biomarkers for the prevention of arteriosclerosis and its associated complications, such as heart attack (coronary heart disease, CHD), stroke (cerebrovascular disease, vascular dementia), or acute occlusion of extremity arteries (peripheral arterial occlusive disease, PAOD).By recruiting affected siblings and their partners, we aim to consider both genetic predispositions and environmental factors, as well as their possible interactions, that may contribute to the risk of atherosclerosis. The resulting genomic and proteomic data will be linked using existing and newly developed statistical algorithms.