News and EventsEight new blood pressure genes discovered
11th May 2009
Scientists at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge working with 164 scientists from 93 centres in Europe and the USA have identified eight common genetic variations which have an influence on blood pressure.
High blood pressure affects at least eighteen million people in the UK and is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke being responsible for at least seven million deaths worldwide each year. Although lack of exercise, being overweight and too much salt in the diet, raise blood pressure, it has long been established that high blood pressure runs in families. This suggests that alterations within genes may predispose individuals to getting raised blood pressure.
In work funded in part by the Medical Research Council (MRC) published in Nature Genetics, scientists scanned the entire human genetic code, looking for variations affecting blood pressure. To do this the researchers from the Global BPgen consortium compared 2.5 million genetic variants from 34,433 people of European ancestry with measurements of their blood pressure. This enabled the discovery of eight genetic differences that related to slightly higher, or slightly lower blood pressure. To confirm these were real findings they checked the same genetic variants in up to 90,000 additional white European individuals and 12,000 people of South Indian Asian descent). The group also compared results to those of a second paper from the CHARGE consortium published simultaneously.
The researchers note that although the blood pressure effect of each these eight genetic variants is modest (1 to 0.5 mm Hg), in combination they could influence the risk of stroke or heart attack. What is more important, they say, is that their findings will help understand the underlying causes of high blood pressure and, in the future, may point to new ways of treating the condition.
Further research is needed to clarify exactly how these genetic differences influence blood pressure but the researchers suspect that some of the genes involved may control the production of chemicals, known as steroids, which affect how the kidneys process salt, others may influence how the blood vessels regulate blood pressure. Many of the genetic variants discovered would not ever have been suspected from our current knowledge of blood pressure.
Further information about this study, including interviews with the leading authors, is availble at the Queen Mary, University of London website:
The findings described in this article are taken from the following publication:
Newton-Cheh C, et al. Genome-wide association study identifies eight loci associated with blood pressure. Nature Genetics. 2009 May 10. Published online in advance of print.
doi: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ng.361.html
