Blood Pressure and Cardiovascular Risk: Another Way to Assess the Connection

Blood pressure (BP) targets continue to generate lots of discussion and even confusion. For further insights, investigators made use of UK Biobank data to conduct mendelian randomization analyses examining whether BP has a nonlinear effect on cardiovascular risk. These types of studies leverage randomly allocated genetic variants, in this case variants associated with BP levels, to determine differences in risk.

The 255,714 participants did not have baseline cardiovascular disease (CVD) and were not taking antihypertensive medications. Over a maximum of 12 years, they experienced 10,606 incident CVD events (8430 coronary artery disease events and 2176 stroke events). The genetically proxied systolic and diastolic BPs were strongly associated…