A New Strategy for Treating High Blood Pressure

The key to treating blood pressure might lie in people who are “resistant” to developing high blood pressure even when they eat high salt diets, shows new research published today in Experimental Physiology.

 Over 1.1 billion people across the globe suffer from high blood pressure and it is the leading cause of other diseases, including chronic kidney disease, stroke and heart disease.

While some peoples’ blood pressure spikes when they eat high-salt diets, others, called salt-resistant, are able to get rid of salt more effectively and thus don’t experience changes in blood pressure. One way to combat blood pressure would be to mimic what these people are doing to avoid high blood pressure.

BUSM researchers, led by corresponding author Richard Wainford, PhD, associate professor of Pharmacology and Medicine, looked at how cells in a specific part of the brain (called the hypothalamus) controlled salt-resistance and found a structural change in the cells that allows for them to change their response to salt.

“Our findings have implications for the development of personalized anti‐hypertensive therapeutics designed to target the pathway involved in changing cells to bring about salt-resistance in the body,” added first author Jesse Moreira, PhD candidate.