A program of research in cardiovascular genetic epidemiology

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High blood pressure affects around 30% of all adults in England. This program, involving researchers from the University of Leicester, and from St. George’s Medical School, aims to identify the genetic causes of high blood pressure. With my collaborators, I will try to identify regions of the human genome and the variants within them that affect blood pressure. We will screen more than half a million points in the genome where key variations occur in 1500 people from the 1958 Birth Cohort. We will build on these findings by studying some genomic regions in detail in the GRAPHIC study, involving 500 Leicestershire families who have had blood pressure measured over a complete 24-hour period. At the same time, I will work with other researchers at the University of Leicester to explore the impact of some common, but poorly-understood, types of structural variation in the human genome. We will also develop powerful new ways of combining all these types of information to identify genes that affect blood pressure. Our aim is to find variations that cause high blood pressure and these findings will improve our understanding of how high blood pressure occurs, and how it can be prevented and treated.