Investigating a potential causal relationship between maternal blood pressure during pregnancy and future offspring cardiometabolic health
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Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Observational epidemiological studies have reported that higher maternal blood pressure (BP) during pregnancy is associated with increased future risk of offspring cardiometabolic disease. However, it is unclear whether this association represents a causal relationship through intrauterine mechanisms. We used a Mendelian randomization (MR) framework to examine the relationship between unweighted maternal genetic scores for systolic BP and diastolic BP and a range of cardiometabolic risk factors in the offspring of up to 29 708 genotyped mother-offspring pairs from the UKB study (UK Biobank) and the HUNT study (Trøndelag Health). We conducted similar analyses in up to 21 423 father-offspring pairs from the same cohorts. We confirmed that the BP-associated genetic variants from the general population sample also had similar effects on maternal BP during pregnancy in independent cohorts. We did not detect any association between maternal (or paternal) unweighted genetic scores and cardiometabolic offspring outcomes in the meta-analysis of UKB and HUNT after adjusting for offspring genotypes at the same loci. We find little evidence to support the notion that maternal BP is a major causal risk factor for adverse offspring cardiometabolic outcomes in later life.
Date Issued
2022-01
Date Acceptance
2021-10-20
Citation
Hypertension, 2022, 79 (1), pp.170-177
ISSN
0194-911X
Publisher
Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health)
Start Page
170
End Page
177
Journal / Book Title
Hypertension
Volume
79
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Authors. Hypertension is published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.121.17701
Subjects
Cardiovascular System & Hematology
1102 Cardiorespiratory Medicine and Haematology
1103 Clinical Sciences
1117 Public Health and Health Services
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-11-17