A program of research in cardiovascular genetic epidemiology

在英国，大约30%的成年人患有高血压。该项目由来自莱斯特大学和圣乔治医学院的研究人员参与，旨在确定高血压的遗传原因。与我的合作者一起，我将尝试识别人类基因组的区域以及其中影响血压的变异。我们将筛查1958年出生队列中1500人的基因组中发生关键变异的50多万个点。我们将在这些发现的基础上，在图表研究中详细研究一些基因组区域，涉及500个莱斯特郡家庭，他们在完整的24小时内测量了血压。与此同时，我将与莱斯特大学的其他研究人员合作，探索人类基因组中一些常见但鲜为人知的结构变异类型的影响。我们还将开发强大的新方法，将所有这些类型的信息结合在一起，以识别影响血压的基因。我们的目标是找到导致高血压的变异，这些发现将提高我们对高血压是如何发生的，以及如何预防和治疗的理解。

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.