Anyone who works with hypertensive patients in a clinical setting is often faced with the fact that they come from hypertensive families. In fact, genetic and shared environmental factors, or heritability, have been shown to account for a large part of the variance in blood pressure (BP). It is almost never possible to quantitatively establish the paternal, maternal, or joint contribution to BP. With the help of ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring, Goldstein and co-workers show a type of “heritable” additive effect of BP on male offspring that, it can be speculated, is due to the sum of parental genetic influences. The ABP monitoring during a 24-h period better mirrors the “true individual BP,” permitting one to further dissect the factors contributing to BP and to study in depth the transmission of such traits in families. The next and more difficult step, for researchers, will be to understand whether there are any differences between maternally and paternally inherited factors. Assessment of essential hypertensive families has suggested that maternally inherited factors may be partly responsible for development of hypertension and there are also new insights from animal studies that points to a specific role for mitochondriopathy. Moreover it has been recently found in humans that a maternally inherited form of hypertension is due to a mutation in mitochondrial DNA. Together, these discoveries have opened a new and promising chapter in the better understanding of genetic factors related to BP
In the name of the father... and the mother.
FAVA, Cristiano
2006-01-01
Abstract
Anyone who works with hypertensive patients in a clinical setting is often faced with the fact that they come from hypertensive families. In fact, genetic and shared environmental factors, or heritability, have been shown to account for a large part of the variance in blood pressure (BP). It is almost never possible to quantitatively establish the paternal, maternal, or joint contribution to BP. With the help of ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring, Goldstein and co-workers show a type of “heritable” additive effect of BP on male offspring that, it can be speculated, is due to the sum of parental genetic influences. The ABP monitoring during a 24-h period better mirrors the “true individual BP,” permitting one to further dissect the factors contributing to BP and to study in depth the transmission of such traits in families. The next and more difficult step, for researchers, will be to understand whether there are any differences between maternally and paternally inherited factors. Assessment of essential hypertensive families has suggested that maternally inherited factors may be partly responsible for development of hypertension and there are also new insights from animal studies that points to a specific role for mitochondriopathy. Moreover it has been recently found in humans that a maternally inherited form of hypertension is due to a mutation in mitochondrial DNA. Together, these discoveries have opened a new and promising chapter in the better understanding of genetic factors related to BP
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