title: Environment-Wide Association Study of Blood Pressure in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999-2012).
abstract: Identifying environmental exposures associated with blood pressure is a priority. Recently, we proposed the environment-wide association study to search for and replicate environmental factors associated with phenotypes. We conducted the environment-wide association study (EWAS) using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (1999-2012) which evaluated a total of 71,916 participants to prioritize environmental factors associated with systolic and diastolic blood pressure. We searched for factors on participants from survey years 1999-2006 and tentatively replicated findings in participants from years 2007-2012. Finally, we estimated the overall association and performed a second meta-analysis using all survey years (1999-2012). For systolic blood pressure, self-reported alcohol consumption emerged as our top finding (a 0.04 increase in mmHg of systolic blood pressure for 1 standard deviation increase in self-reported alcohol), though the effect size is small. For diastolic blood pressure, urinary cesium was tentatively replicated; however, this factor demonstrated high heterogeneity between populations (I(2) = 51%). The lack of associations across this wide of an analysis raises the call for a broader search for environmental factors in blood pressure.
authors.affiliation: Computational Epidemiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Denise P
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: McGinnis
authors.affiliation: Computational Epidemiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: John S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Brownstein
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Chirag J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Patel
mesh_terms: D001794:Blood Pressure; D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006306:Health Surveys / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000453:epidemiology*; D009749:Nutrition Surveys / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014481:United States