Essential Hypertension (EH) is a complex trait disease that affects a large proportion of adult population. Although approximately half of the inter-individual variance in blood pressure (BP) level is heritable, discovery and identification of genes responsible for its regulation has remained challenging. The CDH13 gene, encodes for an adhesion glycoprotein T-cadherin, a regulator of vascular wall remodeling and angiogenesis. Therefore, we hypothesized that CDH13 gene might be attributable to the variation of susceptibility to EH. We examined 238 patients with EH (118 men) and 260 healthy controls (131 men) in this study. Participants were drawn from the patient database of Cardiovascular Genome Center at Yonsei University Health System. We identified 7 tagging-single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the CDH13 gene by whole gene sequencing, and genotyped using the TaqMan짰 assay. The allele and genotype frequencies of CDH13 rs12444338 SNP were significantly differences between case and control groups (P=0.038 and P=0.034, respectively). The T allele of rs12444338 was associated with an increased risk of EH (OR 1.77, 95% CI 1.06-2.94, P=0.028) after correction for confounding factors. These findings provide that the CDH13 gene polymorphism (rs12444338) is a possible genetic risk factor for EH in Koreans. Further investigations are required to evaluate relationship between CDH13 gene SNP (rs12444338) and functional consequences that lead to EH or BP.