American Journal of Public Health Education, genetic ancestry, and blood pressure in African Americans and Whites

1. Objectives: please state your goals, not what you already did. We have reworded this section appropriately. Materials and Methods 1. Participants: Paragraph 1, line 9: "subjects included . have" should be "had". Thanks for catching our mistake, we have changed this. 2. A short paragraph clarifying exclusion criteria should be included. The inclusion criteria for each analysis are explained in the second paragraph of the participants section of the methods. To make this more clear, we have added the phrase “inclusion criteria. ” 3. The authors should include a brief explanation of the FBPP, outlining how data (especially measurement of blood pressure) was collected in the original study. We have added a short description of the purpose of the FBPP under the Participants section of the Methods. “The FBPP study was established in 1995 by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), for the purpose of studying hypertension and/or cardiovascular otucomes in multiple ethnic groups. This dataset was compiled from 13 different field centers, using standardized clinical and genotyping protocols, as described in detail by the FBPP Investigators. 18 ” We have also added a sentence to the description of the blood pressure measurements in the methods, under the section Blood Pressure and Covariates, “The BP measures were averaged from multiple (usually) three measurements taken in a single clinic visit using a Dinamap, or if unavailable, Omron instrument. ” Reviewer #6: The manuscript titled " Education, genetic ancestry, and blood pressure in African Americans and Whites" is an interesting work in the pursuit to find association of factors affecting Blood Pressure in ethnically diverse groups. Single most frequent parameter, education, versus genetic ancestry has been taken into consideration.In my opinion, the educational status is also linked with socioeconomic background. It would have been given more weightage to the paper if this parameter was also included in the model. Nonetheless, an interest work. The FBPP dataset does not have any additional data on socioeconomic background, which is why we use education to represent socioeconomic background. We recognize that this is not an ideal measure in the limitations section, but we also note that education alone is predictive of BP. References 1. Dumler F. Dietary Sodium Intake and Arterial Blood Pressure. Journal of Renal Nutrition 2009;19(1):57. 2. Taylor RS, Ashton KE, Moxham T, Hooper L, Ebrahim S. Reduced dietary salt for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2011(7):CD009217. 3. Shriver MD, Parra EJ, Dios S, Bonilla C, Norton H, Jovel C, et al. Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping. Hum Genet 2003;112(4):387-99. 4. Govil SR, Weidner G, Merritt-Worden T, Ornish D. Socioeconomic status and improvements in lifestyle, coronary risk factors, and quality of life: the Multisite Cardiac Lifestyle Intervention Program. Am J Public Health 2009;99(7):1263-70. 4. Cook NR, Cohen J, Hebert PR, Taylor JO, Hennekens CH. Implications of small reductions in diastolic blood pressure for primary prevention. Arch Intern Med 1995;155(7):701-9. 5. Whelton PK, He J, Appel LJ, Cutler JA, Havas S, Kotchen TA, et al. Primary Prevention of Hypertension. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 2002;288(15):1882-1888. 6. Stamler R. Implications of the INTERSALT study. Hypertension 1991;17(1 Suppl):I16-20.