Patients with high blood pressure respond very differently to antihypertensive medication, making treatment selection tricky for physicians.
But new research published in the online open access journal, BMC Medical Genetics, pinpoints a number of gene-drug interactions that could allow medication to be tailored to individual patients based on their genetics.
Sharon Kardia from the University of Michigan together with a US team drawn from the University of Texas, Houston and the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, studied siblings with hypertension participating in a Genetic Epidemiology Network of Arteriopathy study. The team took blood pressure readings and details of the subjects' drug regimens. Using these data, the authors found a new set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on the adducin 2 (ADD2) gene that may influence the regulation of blood pressure among people with hypertension.
Variation in blood pressure was affected by genotype, drugs and interactions between the two. The researchers used cross-validation methods to test the predictive power of their findings on individuals outside the study group, eliminating false positive findings.