It is a disease which afflicts about one billion people across the globe. Now a chance discovery by a team of Chinese doctors has shed new light on the possible cause of high blood pressure - and even the possibility of a vaccine.
The team from the Beijing Chaoyang Hospital's Cardiology Centre have found a correlation between infection by a common virus and high blood pressure, or hypertension - a finding that may overturn the conventional understanding of the disease.
The virus at the centre of the research is human cytomegalovirus (HCMV). HCMV is a common virus that infects most people at some time during their lives but rarely causes obvious illness.
Research team leader Dr Yang Xinchun said that it was in 2009 that they accidentally discovered that the levels of hcmv-miR-UL112, a type of microRNA generated after contracting HCMV, was three times higher in people with hypertension than those without.
That result, from a small testing group involving just 13 high blood pressure patients and five healthy ones, prompted the doctors to look more closely.
'There are some other types of microRNA related with the HCMV, and some other researchers have done experiments in exploring the connection between them and hypertension,' Yang said. 'But for miR-UL112, there was no research. Therefore, we decided to head our research towards this direction.'
In a larger-scale screening held last year, the levels of hcmv-miR-UL112 in 197 hypertension patients was found to be 2.52 times that of 97 people without high blood pressure.
