Summary:Several large international groups of researchers report data that more than doubles the number of sites in the human genome tied to blood pressure regulation. One of the studies turned up unexpected hints that biochemical signals controlling blood pressure may spring from within cells that line blood vessels themselves.
Several large international groups of researchers report data that more than doubles the number of sites in the human genome tied to blood pressure regulation. One of the studies, by Johns Hopkins University scientists in collaboration with many other groups, turned up unexpected hints that biochemical signals controlling blood pressure may spring from within cells that line blood vessels themselves.
The three studies appear Sept. 12 in the journal Nature Genetics. The study, with first author Georg Ehret, M.D., a research associate at Johns Hopkins, was a so-called genomewide association study involving information gathered on 342,415 people of both European and non-European descent.
“It’s thought that about half the explanation for our blood pressure comes from environmental and lifestyle factors, like diet, exercise and smoking, and the other half is controlled by our genes,” says Aravinda Chakravarti, Ph.D., professor of medicine in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and leader of the Johns Hopkins component. “But as with many other complex, multigene traits, pinning down what those genes are is challenging.” Prior to the new studies now reported, Chakravarti says, his and other groups had identified some 90 sites in the genome as likely linked to blood pressure regulation, but in sum, they could not explain