From the Georgia Prevention Institution, Department of Population Health Sciences, Augusta University (Y.H., X.W., S.S., X.W.); Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (M.O., J.K.) and Department of Public Health (P.S., L.M., J.K.), University of Helsinki; The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's Framingham Heart Study, MA (T.H., D.L.); The Population Sciences Branch, Division of Intramural Research, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Bethesda, MD (T.H., D.L.); The Mississippi Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR), The University of Mississippi Medical Center (J.W.); and Department of Epidemiology, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (H.S.).
Recently, 2 transcriptome-wide studies identified 40 genes that were differentially expressed in relation to blood pressure. However, to what extent these BP-related gene expression signatures and their associations with BP are driven by genetic or environmental factors has not been investigated. In this study of 391 twins (193 twin pairs and 5 singletons; age 55-69 years; 40% male; 57% monozygous) recruited from the Finnish Twin Cohort, transcriptome-wide data on peripheral leukocytes were obtained using the Illumina HT12 V4 array. Our transcriptome-wide analysis identified 1 gene (MOK [MAPK/MAK/MRK overlapping kinase], P=7.16×10-8) with its expression levels associated with systolic BP at the cutoff of false-discovery rate