Project description:<p>The ICBP consortium is an international effort to investigate blood-pressure genetics. The consortium was formed by two parent consortia, the CHARGE-BP consortium (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology - blood pressure) and the GBPGEN consortium (Global Blood Pressure Genetics Consortium).</p> <p>In 2011 we performed genome-wide association analyses based on genome-wide SNPs imputed to HapMap for systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP) and mean arterial pressure and pulse pressure (MAP and PP).</p> <p>In 2016 we performed an analysis based on the Cardio-MetaboChip for SBP and DBP.</p> <p>All these datasets are available here, however, full association statistics including effect size directions, only under controlled access by dbGaP.</p>
Project description:We carried out a genome-wide association and replication study for blood pressure in a two-stage approach (max N = 289,038) with a discovery stage sample of 130,777 East Asian individuals, identifying 19 new genetic loci. We found a significant genetic heterogeneity between East Asian and European-descent populations at several blood pressure loci, conforming to “a common ancestry-specific variant association model”. At 6 unique loci, distinct non-rare (or common) ancestry-specific variants co-localized within the same linkage disequilibrium block despite the significantly discordant direction of effects for the proxy shared variants between the ethnic groups. The genome-wide transethnic correlation of causal-variant effect sizes is 0.898 and 0.851 for systolic and diastolic blood pressure, respectively. Some of the ancestry-specific association signals were also influenced by a selective sweep. Our results provide new evidence for the role of common ancestry-specific variants and natural selection in the occurrence of ethnic differences in complex traits such as blood pressure.