Excess maternal salt intake produces sex-specific hypertension in offspring: putative roles for kidney and gastrointestinal sodium handling.

ABSTRACT: Hypertension is common and contributes, via cardiovascular disease, towards a large proportion of adult deaths in the Western World. High salt intake leads to high blood pressure, even when occurring prior to birth - a mechanism purported to reside in altered kidney development and later function. Using a combination of in vitro and in vivo approaches we tested whether increased maternal salt intake influences fetal kidney development to render the adult individual more susceptible to salt retention and hypertension. We found that salt-loaded pregnant rat dams were hypernatraemic at day 20 gestation (147±5 vs. 128±5 mmoles/L). Increased extracellular salt impeded murine kidney development in vitro, but had little effect in vivo. Kidneys of the adult offspring had few structural or function

SUBMITTER: Gray C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3749995 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature