Intermediate Phenotype And Genome Scan Study Of The Chinese Han Population Hypertension

Background: Essential hypertension (EH) is the most prevalentcardiovascular disorder, and a major risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, cardiac disfunction and renal diseases. The prevalence of hypertension has been increasing worldwide and hypertension is a major public health challenge. The pathogenesis of hypertension is complicated, environmental factors such as age, gender, body mass, salt intake, stress and living style can chronically influence blood pressure. The heritability of hypertension, or the genetic contribution to blood pressure variation, ranges from 30% to 50%. Essential hypertension is one of the complex traits that do not exhibit Mendelian inheritance.It is very important but difficulty to dissect the genetic pathogenesis of hypertension. In the past decade, candidate gene studies provided substantial evidence of the involvement of variants in genes, and genome scan studies also revealed decadal genomic regions that may contribute to blood pressure variation. Tremendous differences were observed in results of candidate and genome scan approaches among different populations. Few genes has been verified to substantially account for hypertension or blood pressure variation, due to heterogeneity and complexity, in which blood pressure or hypertension is influenced by a variety of environmental factors.An extremely large hypertension family was identified in a village from Shijingshan District of Beijing, where cardiovaslar epidemiological studies of Fu Wai Hospital are based. The pedigree covers 7 generations including 398 individuals, and appears to be a unique genetic resource for hypertension genetic study. With this pedigree, we first paid special attention to intermediate phenotype of hypertension, and then applied...