Gene-based analysis of rare and common variants to determine association with blood pressure

Systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure are known risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and understanding their genetic basis will have important public health implications. For rare variants, it is extremely challenging to make statistical inference for single-maker tests. Therefore, joint analysis of a set of variants has been proposed. In this paper, we applied recently proposed methods "test for testing the effect of an optimally weighted combination of variants" and "variable weight-TOW" to determine genetic regions that are associated with blood pressure. Then least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, as well as sparse partial least square methods, were used to identify significant markers within a gene or in intergenic regions. We investigated the effect of rare variants and common variants, and their combined effect.