We conducted primary discovery in the Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) cohort (n=99,785 for this study) that is composed of non-Hispanic whites (81%; 80,792), Latinos (8%; 8,231), East Asians (7%; 7,243), African Americans (3%; 3,058), and South Asians (1%; 461) (Table 1). GERA is part of the Kaiser Permanente Research Program on Genes, Environment, and Health (RPGEH), whose participants are members of an integrated health care delivery system. The average follow-up time was 4 years, beginning at age 60.9, leading to high prevalence of hypertension and anti-hypertensive therapy. Figure 1 describes the EHR extraction and study design (Online Methods). Multiple BP measurements (1,342,814 total) were available for many participants: 46.4% had at least one untreated measurement and 62.6% had at least one treated measurement. We included all individuals who had at least one (untreated or treated) BP measurement. The multiple measurements enabled the use of a long-term average to increase accuracy7. There were differences in anthropometric and BP values at the first visit among the race/ethnicity groups (Table 1): African Americans and Latinos had the highest
