Genome-Wide Association Studies of Hypertension: Have They Been Fruitful?

Over the last two decades candidate gene association studies and genome-wide linkage scans have met with little success in characterizing risk variants for hypertension. Several factors could be responsible for the relative lack of success, although our understanding of the genetics has evolved to support the belief that there are multiple common risk variants, which are associated with hypertension with modest effect sizes. Genome-wide …