Joonatan Palmu defended his doctoral thesis “Metabolomics and metagenomics in hypertension”. He demonstrated that gut microbiota is associated with human hypertension, created metabolic profile for hypertension and found a strong connection between eicosanoids and blood pressure.
High-blood pressure is globally a leading risk factor for mortality, but still the exact mechanisms behind hypertension onset remain unclear. The rapid development in studying genome, proteome, metabolome, and metagenome offer robust methods for studying complex biological phenomena in large population samples.
This thesis improves the current knowledge on the associations of gut microbiota and circulating metabolites with blood pressure. Metabolomics and metagenomics offer novel approaches to improve hypertension risk prediction and to discover potential targets for therapeutic intervention of elevated blood pressure.