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Association analysis between an epigenetic alcohol risk score and blood pressure.

Clinical epigenetics

Authors: Helena Bui, Amena Keshawarz, Mengyao Wang, Mikyeong Lee, Scott M Ratliff, Lisha Lin, Kira S Birditt, Jessica D Faul, Annette Peters, Christian Gieger, Thomas Delerue, Sharon L R Kardia, Wei Zhao, Xiuqing Guo, Jie Yao, Jerome I Rotter, Yi Li, Xue Liu, Dan Liu, Juliana F Tavares, Gökhan Pehlivan, Monique M B Breteler, Irma Karabegovic, Carolina Ochoa-Rosales, Trudy Voortman, Mohsen Ghanbari, Joyce B J van Meurs, Mohamed Kamal Nasr, Marcus Dörr, Hans J Grabe, Stephanie J London, Alexander Teumer, Melanie Waldenberger, David R Weir, Jennifer A Smith, Daniel Levy, Jiantao Ma, Chunyu Liu

BACKGROUND: Epigenome-wide association studies have identified multiple DNA methylation sites (CpGs) associated with alcohol consumption, an important lifestyle risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that an alcohol consumption epigenetic risk score (ERS) is associated with blood pressure (BP) traits.

RESULTS: We implemented an ERS based on a previously reported epigenetic signature of 144 alcohol-associated CpGs in meta-analysis of participants of European ancestry. We found a one-unit increment of ERS was associated with eleven drinks of alcohol consumed per day, on average, across several cohorts (p < 0.0001). We examined the association of the ERS with systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and hypertension (HTN) in 3,898 Framingham Heart Study (FHS) participants. Cross-sectional analyses in FHS revealed that a one-unit increment of the ERS was associated with 1.93 mm Hg higher SBP (p = 4.64E-07), 0.68 mm Hg higher DBP (p = 0.006), and an odds ratio of 1.78 for HTN (p < 2E-16). Meta-analysis of the cross-sectional association of the ERS with BP traits in eight independent external cohorts (n = 11,544) showed similar relationships with BP levels, i.e., a one-unit increase in ERS was associated with 0.74 mm Hg (p = 0.002) higher SBP and 0.50 mm Hg (p = 0.0006) higher DBP, but not with HTN. Longitudinal analyses in FHS (n = 3260) and five independent external cohorts (n = 4021) showed that the baseline ERS was not associated with a change in BP over time or with incident HTN.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that the ERS has potential clinical utility in assessing lifestyle factors related to cardiovascular risk, especially when self-reported behavioral data (e.g., alcohol consumption) are unreliable or unavailable.

© 2024. The Author(s).

PMID: 39468603

Participating cluster members