Sunday, February 1, 2015

Chronic intermittent hypoxia increases sympathetic control of blood pressure: role of neuronal activity in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus.

Sharpe AL, Calderon AS, Andrade MA, Cunningham JT, Mifflin SW, Toney GM.
Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2013 Dec;305(12):H1772-80.

This is a very slightly older paper from some of the same people I posted about last weekend. They were still looking to see how chronic intermittent hypoxia (CIH) could affect lumbar and renal sympathetic nerve activity (LSNA and RSNA), based on the existing theory that CIH causes hyperactivity of the chemoreflex, and the changes happen by way of the paraventricular nucleus (PVN). This time, the parameters of the CIH were: O2 levels were reduced to 10% for 6 minutes, 10x per hour, for 8 hours a day, for 7 consecutive days.

In this study they found that, compared to control rats, CIH rats had significantly higher MAP by day 3, with differences in heart rate not reaching significance. Rats exposed to 7 days of CIH had a greater reduction in MAP after ganglionic blockade (hexamethonium) than was seen in control rats, which indicated that CIH rats have increased sympathetic tone. Furthermore, muscimol inactivation of PVN caused greater reductions of lumbar SNA and MIP in CIH rats than controls, which also supports the idea that CIH rats have higher sympathetic tone. Furthermore, when CIH rats were given hypertonic saline directly in to the carotid artery, they showed a larger increase in LSNA (but not in RSNA) than control rats did. This suggests that there may be a greater LSNA responsiveness in CIH rats, and NOT a blunted/ceiling effect due to the higher SNA tone. This is also interesting on the basis that it adds more data to the idea of differential control of SNA. -DH

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