Assessment of DNA Damage in Peripheral Blood Leukocytes of Patients with Essential Hypertension by the Alkaline Comet Assay

Abstract

Summary DNA damage was assessed in 50 subjects using the alkaline Single Cell Gel Electrophoresis assay and included 35 (18 males, 17 females) hypertensive individuals and 15 (7 males, 8 females) normotensives of the same age, sex and socio-economic status. Patients (32-62 years) had average systolic blood pressure Ͼ156 mmHg, diastolic pressure Ͼ98 mmHg, pulse and arterial pressure of Ͼ56 and Ͼ116 mmHg, respectively. Average BMI was 25.18 kg/m 2 , 54% were overweight, 16.45% obese and waist hip ratio (WHR) Ͼ0.95. Chi-square test revealed that controls matched patients except for blood pressure values. Multiple regression analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that DNA damage significantly associated with systolic (pϽ0.05), diastolic blood pressure (pϽ0.05) and mean arterial pressure (pϽ0.05). Mann-Whitney U-test revealed that 80.54% cells with tails and mean DNA migration length of 50.01Ϯ1.01 mm were significantly higher (pϽ0.001) in patients compared to controls (27.21%; 20.33Ϯ0.74 mm). These differences between male and female patients/controls were, however, non-significant. The differences for drug-usage and WHR were non-significant while BMI and blood pressure values revealed significant DNA damage differences. The physiological state of hypertension probably has the potential to cause genetic damage as assessed in the present study by the SCGE assay since DNA migration length and percent cells with tails were highly significant (pϭ0.001) as compared to values in normo-tensive, healthy controls.