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(Hypertension. 2005;46:1256.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial Commentaries

Dissecting Hypertension by Obesity Identifies a Locus at 1p36

Brian J. Morris

From the Basic & Clinical Genomics Laboratory, School of Medical Sciences and Institute for Biomedical Research, The University of Sydney, Australia.

Correspondence to Brian J. Morris, PhD, DSc, School of Medical Sciences, Anderson Stuart Building, F13, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail brianm@medsci.usyd.edu.au

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

The elevated arterial pressure that defines essential hypertension is regarded as the manifestation of a diverse array of interacting genetic and environmental causes. As such, hypertension is a heterogeneous disorder in which multiple contributing factors are responsible for the overarching phenotype of high blood pressure that is the primary clinical manifestation observed. Such heterogeneity has undoubtedly hampered efforts to elucidate the genetic basis of essential hypertension.

Overweight and obesity are well known to increase the risk of essential hypertension. Yet, there are many hypertensive individuals whose weight is normal. So does obesity hypertension have a different underlying genetic cause than lean hypertension? In the current issue, Pausova et al report finding a locus with suggestive linkage to hypertension and then reanalyzed their data after dividing their families into lean and obese.¹ Of considerable interest, the significance of the linkage peak increased for the obese families but disappeared in the case of the families with hypertension who were not obese. The striking contrast in results for each category of hypertension lends strong support to the idea that hypertension of obesity has a different genetic basis than other categories of hypertension. Not only is this finding important in discovery of the genetic basis of obesity hypertension, but it has obvious implications for approaches that might be used to identify the basis for other "intermediate phenotypes" of hypertension.

The study by Pausova et al involved 55 extended families from the geographically remote French-Canadian Saguenay/Lac-St-Jean region of Quebec. This relatively small, isolated population has . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Genome-Wide Scan for Linkage to Obesity-Associated Hypertension in French Canadians

Zdenka Pausova, Daniel Gaudet, Francis Gossard, Manon Bernard, Mary L. Kaldunski, Michele Jomphe, Johanne Tremblay, Thomas J. Hudson, Gerard Bouchard, Theodore A. Kotchen, Allen W. Cowley, and Pavel Hamet
Hypertension 2005 46: 1280-1285. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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