By IANS,
Washington : Researchers have identified a molecular mechanism in mice that explains why metabolic disorders like blood pressure and diabetes afflict humans.
Many of the tens of million worldwide with essential hypertension (BP) later go on to develop diabetes and other complications.
University of California researchers showed that a drug developed for humans was effective in counteracting molecular mechanism in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR), a strain predisposed to develop high BP.
Frank DeLano of University of California and Geert Schmid-Schönbein, a bioengineer, explained how they successfully reversed the SHR animals’ symptoms of high BP, a pre-diabetes condition called insulin resistance and immune suppression.
The SHR strain is a model for essential hypertension in humans because both the rodent and many humans with hypertension also develop a variety of other metabolic complications when high blood pressure strikes.
H. Glenn Bohlen of the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology, Indiana University Medical School, wrote that “with the national and international emphasis on obesity and its attendant cardiovascular problems, there is a tendency to forget that essential hypertension affects about the same percentage of humans as does serious obesity and an even higher percentage of the population than does type 2 diabetes mellitus”.
Said Schmid-Schönbein: “We were looking for a common cause of diverse but concurrent metabolic problems and we were testing our theory that enhanced… activity in the circulation may be the root cause.
“These results point to a single mechanism that explains multiple and diverse cell dysfunctions encountered in hypertensive rats and they also suggest that a similar mechanism may be operating in humans suffering simultaneously from hypertension, diabetes and other metabolic conditions.”
The paper has been published Monday in the online version of Hypertension journal.