Primary Arterial Hypertension News - Menu Family trees may lead to better hypertension care
CBC News
MONTREAL - 05 May 2005 - Some of Quebec's oldest families are helping researchers to zero in on the genetic differences that can lead to high blood pressure, a discovery that could result in individualized treatment. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a condition that can lead to a heart attack or stroke, which together are the country's No. 1 killer. It affects about five million adult Canadians. The genetics of hypertension is complicated. The research suggests about half the risk factors for hypertension are genetic, with environmental factors like smoking and a high-fat diet determining the rest. There isn't a single gene for hypertension, though, and the condition comes in many forms, the new study shows. Within a generation, doctors should be able to diagnose the cause of an individual's hypertension using a simple blood test for genetic susceptibility, said Dr. Pavel Hamet, director of research at the University of Montreal Hospital Centre. "In some families, obesity is a huge risk factor for blood pressure," said Hamet, the project's lead investigator. "In others, it's not. So this is going to teach me how to better treat." To make the discovery, Hamet and his colleagues created a genetic database of 120 families in Quebec's Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region. The families, who all trace their histories to 1680, are more predisposed to hypertension than people in the rest of Canada.
No more trial and error
Researchers put 900 members of the families through a battery of tests to check their cardiovascular health and to screen their genes for 250 clinical traits. Hamet said the findings may explain why giving anti-hypertension medications fails to work in half of patients. The drugs cost the health-care system over $1,500 a year per person. Currently, doctors resort to trial and error to find the best combination of drugs and lifestyle changes for people with hypertension. Hamet foresees a day when a blood test could tell doctors what treatment to prescribe to target the genes responsible for the condition in each patient. "Let's do medicine which will be targeted for everybody," said Hamel. "Who they are genetically and in which environment they live." The study by Hamet and his colleagues at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, Ecole Polytechnique and McGill University in Montreal, the University of Ottawa, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., and the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee appears in the May issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
The research is sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and Valorisation Recherche Québec.
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