No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
A genetic study on a sample of patients suffering from essential hypertension has confirmed the inheritance of this disease. In single individuals and in families, especially in young female subjects, the same hereditary load often leads to the appearance of a vascular headache. In some family groups, the vascular headache seems to occur more frequently than in others. This fact suggests the hypothesis of a possible existence of factors able to favour the appearance of this trouble. After considering the data collected from the study of three generations of relatives of the hypertensive propositi, it seems possible to state that the hereditary load usually develops into vascular headache in young age, and hypertension in old age, while headache tends to disappear. This pattern, usually frequent, is not quite constant, and, in the same families, it is possible to find subjects affected with hypertension only, and others (also in old age) with headache only. Therefore, it is possible to think that the abovementioned diseases are pleiotropically determined by the same genetic factors, occurring in different ways, according to age, sex and other genotypic factors. The statistical analysis of the collected data suggests that such disease be inherited as a dominant monomeric autosomal trait, with a higher penetrance in old than in young people. Headache seems to prefer female subjects, while hypertension does not show any sex-preference.