Genetic Contribution to the Variance of Blood Pressure and Heart Rate: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression of Twin Studies

The genetic contribution of blood pressure and heart rate (HR) varied widely between studies. Demographic factors such as ethnicity, age and/or sex might explain some of the heterogeneity. We performed a systematic review focusing on four phenotypes: systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Twin research and human genetics 2015-04, Vol.18 (2), p.158-170
Main Authors: Wang, Biqi, Liao, Chunxiao, Zhou, Bin, Cao, Weihua, Lv, Jun, Yu, Canqing, Gao, Wenjing, Li, Liming
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Bias
Blood pressure
Blood Pressure - genetics
Environmental factors
Estimates
Ethnicity
Female
Gender differences
Gene-Environment Interaction
Genotype & phenotype
Heart rate
Heart Rate - genetics
Heritability
Humans
Hypertension
Male
Minority & ethnic groups
Phenotypes
Questionnaires
Statistical methods
Twin studies
Twin Studies as Topic
Twins
Twins - genetics
White people
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Summary:The genetic contribution of blood pressure and heart rate (HR) varied widely between studies. Demographic factors such as ethnicity, age and/or sex might explain some of the heterogeneity. We performed a systematic review focusing on four phenotypes: systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), HR and pulse pressure (PP). Meta-regression was conducted to analyze potential factors in relation to SBP and DBP heritability. A total of 10,613 independent twins that came from 17 studies were included in the analysis. The weighted mean value of heritability for SBP and DBP was 0.54 (95% CIs: 0.48–0.60) and 0.49 (95% CIs: 0.42–0.56). Comparatively, three studies of HR and four studies of PP heritability were limited for the heterogeneity test. Meta-regression showed that, on average, SBP heritability with additive genes/unique environment (AE) model tend to have a higher heritability than additive genes/shared environment/unique environment (ACE) model (coefficient = 0.0947, p = .0142). A similar result was found for DBP as well. No other factors such as sex, age, ethnicity, publication year were significantly associated with heritability variance. Our study shows heritability estimates based on twin studies of both SBP and DBP are around 50%, using an AE rather than an ACE model; the variance due to C ended up in A, suggesting that the AE model may overestimate heritability if a small contribution of shared environment exists.
ISSN:1832-4274
1839-2628
DOI:10.1017/thg.2015.8