Insight into the genetics of hypertension, a core component of the metabolic syndrome

Purpose of review To provide insight into genetics of essential hypertension, including discussion of methods used both in human and animal experimental studies and interpretation of results. Recent findings On the basis of recent progress in sequencing of human genome, detection of millions of single nucleotide polymorphism markers, determination of the extend of linkage disequilibrium (haplotypes), efficient genotyping technology, collection of DNA from thousands of rigorously phenotyped patients and controls and designing sound statistical methods, genome-wide associations studies were widely applied to analyses of common diseases including essential hypertension for the first time in 2007. Concurrently, new experimental approaches combined gene expression profiling with linkage and correlation analyses to identify quantitative trait loci underlying complex traits at the molecular level. Summary These new approaches yielded new exciting results but also posed questions regarding data analyses, interpretation and clinical significance.