Marguerite Irvin
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Public Health & Epidemiology
High blood pressure (hypertension) and chronic kidney disease fall especially hard on African Americans. These conditions lead to higher rates of stroke, coronary heart disease, kidney failure and death.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
hypertension
high blood pressure
chronic kidney disease
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Identify genetic variants that predict blood pressure response to chlorthalidone (a diuretic) or lisinopril (an ACE inhibitor) in more than 6,500 African Americans from the randomized GenHAT trial, with validation through the ICAPS consortium.
- Discover genetic variants linked to hypertension and chronic kidney disease using genome-wide association data from about 17,000 African Americans in the REGARDS, JHS, GenOA and HyperGEN cohorts from TOPMed.
- Replicate top variant associations in about 11,000 additional African Americans, then build and test polygenic risk scores (combined genetic risk estimates) for cardiorenal disease in other TOPMed cohorts.
- Derive genetic screening tools that predict antihypertensive treatment response and heart and kidney outcomes such as stroke and end-stage renal disease in African Americans.
More about the research
Blood pressure medicines lower these risks, but people do not all respond to them equally. African Americans tend to respond best to calcium channel blockers and diuretics (water pills), and less well to several other drug classes, compared with European Americans. Both environment and inherited genes are thought to explain these differences. Yet genetic studies of African Americans have been much smaller than those of European-ancestry groups. That gap makes genetic risk prediction less accurate for this population and could create new health disparities.
Why it matters
African Americans face higher rates of hypertension, chronic kidney disease, stroke and kidney failure, while genetic risk tools are built mostly from European-ancestry data. This work could produce screening tools based on genetic markers measured in the clinic. These tools may help doctors predict who is at risk and which blood pressure drug will work best. The result could be better prevention and treatment, and less risk of widening health disparities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nicholette Allred
Wake Forest University, NC·Genetics
Identify rare genetic variants associated with liver fat in 23,156 ethnically diverse TOPMed participants, using whole genome sequencing with single-variant and gene-level rare-variant burden tests.
Penny Gordon-Larsen
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify gene-expression signals underlying severe obesity using whole-blood RNA sequencing from more than 15,000 people, and build ancestry-informed eQTL maps for underrepresented populations.
Dabeeru Rao
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Genetics
Identify new genetic loci for cardiometabolic traits through genome-wide interaction studies (GWIS) with lifestyle factors in about 1.267 million European, African, Hispanic and Asian ancestry participants.
The school
University of Alabama at Birmingham: 45 labs on PI Pages, $866M a year on research, 166 research doctorates a year.
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