1. ¹Division of Receptor Biology, Advanced Medical Research Center, Nihon University School of Medicine, Ooyaguchi-kamimachi, Tokyo, Japan
2. ²Second Department of Internal Medicine, Nihon University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan

Correspondence: Dr T Nakayama, Division of Receptor Biology, Advanced Medical Research Center, Nihon University School of Medicine, Ooyaguchi-kamimachi, 30-1 Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 173-8610, Japan. E-mail: tnakayam@med.nihon-u.ac.jp

Received 22 December 2003; Revised 22 February 2003; Accepted 24 February 2004; Published online 10 June 2004.

Abstract

Essential hypertension (EH) is thought to be a polygenic disease. Several candidate genes of this disease have been investigated in studies using polymorphic genetic markers, but some studies have failed to show any association of EH with these genes. In this experiment, we used microsatellite markers on chromosome 1, and performed an association study between EH and control subjects. Genomic DNA was amplified with fluorescently labelled primers from the Applied Biosystems PRISM linkage mapping set HD-5 comprising 63 highly polymorphic microsatellite markers with an average spacing of 4.5 cM. We isolated three loci showing significant differences: D1S507, D1S2713 and D1S2842. The P-values of the allele with the greatest post hoc contributions in D1S507, D1S2713 and D1S2842 were 0.0008, 0.0062 and 0.0084, respectively. All these values were significant after Bonferroni correction. Furthermore, we found that the three microsatellite alleles were associated with the levels of systolic blood pressure. These data suggest that there are at least the three susceptibility loci for EH on chromosome 1, and that a case–control study using microsatellite markers on genomewide basis is a useful method for isolating the susceptibility loci of multifactorial disorders.