Abstract: Parental history of coronary heart disease (CHD) has long been recognized as a risk factor for CHD. Death from coronary heart disease is influenced by genetic factors both in women and men. Several epidemiological studies have described a number of underlying risk factors for cardiovascular disease (diabetes mellitus, hypercholesterolemia, plasma lipids, hypertension) which are as well under a moderate degree of genetic control. In searching for susceptibility genetic factors associated to coronary artery disease (CAD) we determined the genotypes for 35 candidate genes (63 polymorphisms) in a sample of 757 individuals with angiographically documented coronary artery disease (CAD+, cases), and 320 individuals with angiographically documented normal coronary arteries (CAD-, controls). It is very hard to discover true combinations of multiple factors contributing to the disease. Recent publications show a growing number of genes being studied and correlated with phenotypic variations. The difficulties in treating the increasing amount of available data indicate the need for new tools able to retrive the relevant information. We propose the implementation of the classification tree procedure joined to backward elimination as an explorative tool to screen for genetic factors that may be associated to the CAD phenotype.