With indepth examination of the individual SNP effects on SUA level against the SNP effects on disease outcomes (see online supplementary figures S5–S8), we found that the outlying variant (rs12498742 in SLC2A9) that had the strongest association with SUA level showed a negative (null) effect on essential hypertension and hypertensive disease, which reversed the sign of the overall putative causal effect and led to a rejection of the intercept test. Here, SLC2A9 is linked to essential hypertension.