- The Family Investigation of Diabetes and Nephropathy (FIND) study is an ongoing study to identify susceptibility genes for diabetic and other forms of nephropathy, and the Choices for Healthy Outcomes in Caring for ESRD patients (CHOICE) study is an ongoing prospective study to identify risk factors for cardiovascular outcomes in ESRD patients. Participants of these studies have already been recruited and characterized with respect to renal phenotypes; furthermore, DNAs from these individuals have already been collected and isolated. In this study, we intend to genotype markers suitable for MALD analysis in African Americans. The central hypothesis of the present study is that some renal disease susceptibility alleles are present at higher frequency in African Americans than in whites and that specific regions of the genome in African Americans contain marker alleles that are in admixture linkage disequilibrium with ESRD susceptibility alleles.