After completion of our analyses, three additional large-scale BP/hypertension GWAS have been published42–44, including, as in our study, hundreds of thousands of individuals in discovery and replication phases. Notable among the findings were an enrichment of SNPs also involved in cardiometabolic traits42 and the implication of genetic variation in vascular function42,44, as we also found. Two of the studies42,43 also focused on rare variation, and identified a few larger-effect rare missense and nonsense variants in eight distinct genes. These studies collectively identified 71 distinct novel genome-wide significant loci. Using a broad definition of overlap (r2>0.3), a cursory examination suggests that 16 of these overlap with our 316 novel hits (2 of the 39 from GERA alone, 4 of 36 from GERA+ICBP, and 10 of 241 from GERA+ICBP+UKB). These studies, along with ours, demonstrate the enhanced power of both gene discovery and characterization afforded by expanded sample sizes.
