Abstract
Summary
Arterial hypertension was produced in a group of rats by narrowing one renal artery. These hypertensive rats ingested large doses of a thiazide drug for a period of five weeks. During this period, the drug was completely ineffective for lowering arterial pressure. This is in striking contrast to the great effectiveness of thiazide drugs in alleviating essential hypertension in man. This contrast may point out a fundamental difference in the pathogenesis of these 2 types of hypertension. Moreover, this observation might prove to be clinically useful; hypertensive patients who get a good response to thiazide drugs alone would be more likely to have essential hypertension rather than renovascular hypertension. The inability of the thiazide drugs to alleviate renovascular hypertension in the rat is paralleled by a similar ineffectiveness of the low sodium diet.
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