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Approved research

Severe hypertension in African descent population

Principal Investigator: Dr Amadou Gaye
Approved Research ID: 20106
Approval date: July 1st 2017

Lay summary

The etiology of racial/ethnic differences in health involves dynamic interactions between genetic, behavioral and social-environmental determinants. However these determinants and their interactions are poorly understood in minority populations, in the western world, such as people of African ancestry, partly because of the scarcity of data that span all those determinants. Our aim is to investigate these determinants to identify primarily those associated with conditions including severe hypertension and hypertension induced kidney damage and secondarily to identify determinants associated with related disorders/risk factors including obesity, coronary heart disease and metabolic disease syndrome, in a sample of African descent individuals. UK Biobank main goal is to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a large range of life-threatening illnesses including the condition we are primarily interested in hypertension. Hence our proposed research fits with the global aim of UK Biobank. Furthermore the size of the UK Biobank and the wealth of the collected data enable us to conduct robust analysis of our conditions of interest on a sub-sample by allowing us to achieve a sample size that is quite difficult to obtain under other settings. We will first classify participants according to the outcome of interest (e.g. severe hypertensive vs. normotensive) and undertake statistical analysis to identify determinants associated with a higher risk of disease. We will be looking for genetic, environmental/life style and behavioral determinants associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular or related conditions and estimating the risk related to the interaction between the determinants (e.g. Is the risk increased or decreased in the presence of two or more determinants). We would like to have a subset of the cohort that consists of 9,131 participants which comprises the following ethnic/racial categories: White and Black Caribbean (Coding=2001), White and Black African (Coding=2002), Black or Black British (Coding=4), Caribbean (Coding=4001), African (Coding=4002), Any other Black background (Coding=2003).