Genome-Wide Association Study Of Susceptibility To Particulate Matter-Associated Reduced Heart Rate Variability

Background: Heart rate variability (HRV) is a heritable electrocardiographic measure of cardiac autonnomic control that is consistently and inversely associated with ambient particulate matter (PM) air pollution and risk of both incident cardiovascular disease, and death. However, genetic susceptibility to PM-associated decreases in HRV has not been characterized. Methods: To characterize such susceptibility in a genome-wide context, we conducted cohort-, race/ethnicity-, and sex-stratified longitudinal analyses of ten Women’s Health Initiative clinical trials and Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study subpopulations (total n: 27,121; mean age: 64.6 yr; 81% female; 25% black; 7% Hispanic; mean visits/person: 2.5). In each subpopulation, we log-transformed three previously validated and reliable measures of HRV: RR interval duration (RR); root mean square of successive differences in normal-to-normal RR (RMSSD); and standard deviation of normal-to-normal RR (SDNN). We also estimated mean concentrations ...