We know that salt intake is important with regards to health. Specifically related to issues such as high blood pressure, heart disease and kidney disease. We are interested in figuring out how and why some people have higher blood pressure when they eat a high salt diet and why others do not. Observations on patients with diseases related to the immune system or treated with immune suppressing drugs have suggested that the immune system might be involved in the causes of high blood pressure. Scientists have developed mice which have high blood pressure when they are fed too much salt. Research on such mice has found that if we interfere with parts of the immune system we can influence the effect salt has on their blood pressure.
We hope to identify genetic variation related to the activity of the immune system in humans to see if the same parts of the immune system also affect how a patient’s blood pressure responds to salt intake. We hope to identify this genetic variation in the UK biobank data, before seeing if we can find the same variation in other datasets to attempt to confirm the validity of our initial findings. If we are confident we have identified such genetic variants, it will help us carry out other experiments to better confirm and describe how salt affects the immune system and how these effects influence high blood pressure and disease.
Our expectation is that this process will take approximately 12 months with time spent analysing the data and comparing results with other datasets. We hope that our research, when combined with other research into what causes high blood pressure, targeted treatments can be developed aimed at treating the specific causes for blood pressure in an individual. This kind of personalised medicine is the longer term goal of such research into disease mechanisms.