Description: Hypertension is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Efforts to identify hypertension genes have focused on 3 approaches: mendelian disorders, candidate genes, and genome-wide scans. Thus far, these efforts have not identified genes that contribute substantively to overall blood pressure (BP) variation in the community. Such knowledge could extend our understanding of the genetic basis of essential hypertension and have implications for the evaluation and treatment of patients with high BP.