engleski

Family Aggregation of Blood Pressure and Morphological Characteristics: Path Analytic Approach

The family data used in this study are a subset of the extensive material collected from the random sample of inhabitants of the Middle Dalmatia's islands of Brač, Hvar, Korčula and the Pelješac peninsula. The number of subjects included in this study (1126 examinees, 526 males and 600 females, aged 17 to 87) was determined by the coincidence that two (or more) participants of the original random sample were members of the same family. The Path analysis was performed with the assumption that each family member (father, mother, offspring 1 and 2) has a latent environmental variable (C) that influences both the blood pressure values (P) and the morphological dimensions significantly correlated with blood pressure (Q). According to the estimates revealed from the most parsimonious (MP) models, the diastolic blood pressure has a more pronounced genetic component (h2 = 30-32%) than the systolic blood pressure (h2 = 15%). The MP models do not assume a difference between father and mother in the transmission of their environment on the environment of offsprings, and that parental environmental influence (fM2, fF2) was estimated to be very low (4% and 7%) for systolic and diastolic blood pressure, respectively. In contrast to this low intergenerational influence, the members of the same generation showed a pronounced shared environment component: common (non-transmitted) offsprings' environment explains 44% of variance of the individual offspring' s environment (b2) for systolic and 33-35% for diastolic blood pressure. The correlation of the father's and mother's environment (u2) was high in the case of diastolic blood pressure (33-44%) but for the systolic blood pressure it was not significantly different from zero.

Path analysis; family data; heritability; blood pressure; morphology; BMI; Croatia

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