TY - JOUR TI - Time-to-event modeling of hypertension reveals the nonexistence of true controls AU - Shriner, Daniel AU - Bentley, Amy R AU - Zhou, Jie AU - Ekoru, Kenneth AU - Doumatey, Ayo P AU - Chen, Guanjie AU - Adeyemo, Adebowale AU - Rotimi, Charles N A2 - Zaidi, Mone A2 - Barton, Matthias A2 - Lombard, Zané A2 - van den Born, Bert-Jan VL - 9 PY - 2020 DA - 2020/12/01 SP - e62998 C1 - eLife 2020;9:e62998 DO - 10.7554/eLife.62998 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62998 AB - Given a lifetime risk of ~90% by the ninth decade of life, it is unknown if there are true controls for hypertension in epidemiological and genetic studies. Here, we compared Bayesian logistic and time-to-event approaches to modeling hypertension. The median age at hypertension was approximately a decade earlier in African Americans than in European Americans or Mexican Americans. The probability of being free of hypertension at 85 years of age in African Americans was less than half that in European Americans or Mexican Americans. In all groups, baseline hazard rates increased until nearly 60 years of age and then decreased but did not reach zero. Taken together, modeling of the baseline hazard function of hypertension suggests that there are no true controls and that controls in logistic regression are cases with a late age of onset. KW - hypertension KW - time-to-event KW - health disparity JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -