Cations and the forearm circulation in hypertensive humans

Abstract

Epidemiological studies suggest that excess salt intake contributes to the prevalence of essential hypertension in humans [1]. For the past 15 years, there has been a considerable interest in the effects of excess salt intake on blood pressure and vascular resistance in humans [2–13]. Several important features as to the relationship between excess salt intake and blood pressure in humans have been delineated in these studies. First, it has been clearly shown that effects of dietary salt loading on blood pressure and vascular resistance vary considerably among subjects. Dietary salt loading may produce a marked increase in blood pressure in some but may not alter blood pressure in others [4–6, 11, 13]. Generally speaking, hypertensive patients are more sensitive to dietary salt loading than normotensive subjects [5, 7, 8, 10, 11]. However, it has also been shown that there is a considerable variation in responses to salt loading even among hypertensive patients [4,6,13]. The findings of variable responses to salt loading in humans are consistent with the findings in experimental animals [14-18]. Excess salt intake increases blood pressure and vascular resistance in rats with genetic hypertension but does not alter them in normotensive control rats [14–18].KeywordsEssential HypertensionDietary SaltForearm Blood FlowLower Body Negative PressureNormotensive SubjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.