Genetics of human arterial hypertension

Although everybody agrees that each individual's blood pressure variance is under substantial genetic control, its quantitative estimates vary from 35 to 70%, according to the different experimental designs. The problem is that, in spite of such substantial contribution, the discovery of the "genes that cause hypertension" has been quite discouraging. This is indeed caused by the multifactorial nature of the disease and no improvement is to be expected without dissecting hypertension in its major pathogenetic pathways. As a paradigm of such a dissection, we present the data on adducin system, that proved to be relevant for a common form of salt sensitive in humans and the genetic hypertension of MHS rats.