Two major collaborative studies identify potential therapeutic targets for preventing heart attacks and strokes
by Sam Wong - Monday 12 September 2011 Two major studies published this week in Nature and Nature Genetics have identified a total of 23 gene regions associated with measures of blood pressure. The findings, from the International Consortium for Blood Pressure Genome-Wide Association Studies, represent a major advance in our understanding of the inherited influences on blood pressure and offer new potential therapeutic targets for prevention of heart disease and stroke - the biggest cause of death worldwide. Around a billion people worldwide have hypertension , defined as a systolic blood pressure above 140 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) or a diastolic blood pressure above 90 mmHg. So far, genetic studies have looked for variants associated with these measures of blood pressure, but other measures are also predictive of hypertension and heart disease. Pulse pressure is the difference between systolic and diastolic pressure and mean arterial pressure is a weighted average of the two. The new study published , led by scientists from Imperial College London, the University of Leicester and Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, has identified four gene regions associated with pulse pressure, two linked with mean arterial pressure and one with both traits. The analysis was based on data from over 120,000 people of European ancestry in 35 previous studies.
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