Abstract-Sinoaortic and cardiac baroreflexes exert important control over renal sympathetic nerve activity. Alterations in these reflex mechanisms contribute to renal sympathoexcitation in hypertension. Nonlinear dynamic analysis was used to examine the chaotic behavior of renal sympathetic nerve activity in normotensive Sprague-Dawley and Wistar-Kyoto rats and spontaneously hypertensive rats before and after complete baroreceptor denervation (sinoaortic and cardiac baroreceptor denervation). The peak interval sequence of synchronized renal sympathetic nerve discharge was extracted and used for analysis. In all rat strains, this yielded systems whose correlation dimensions converged to similar low values over the embedding dimension range of 10 to 15 and whose greatest Lyapunov exponents were positive. Key Words: nonlinear dynamics Ⅲ denervation Ⅲ baroreceptors Ⅲ renal nerves T he sinoaortic and cardiac baroreceptor reflexes exert important control over sympathetic nerve activity. The details of these control mechanisms have been studied by observing steady state changes in mean arterial pressure (MAP), heart rate (HR), and sympathetic nerve activity at various times after complete disruption of these reflexes.After sinoaortic baroreceptor denervation, MAP, HR, and renal sympathetic nerve activity (RSNA) were increased on day 1 but returned to control levels on day 14. 1 On day 1, variability of MAP was increased, while that of HR and RSNA was decreased. On day 14, variability of MAP remained increased, while that of HR and RSNA returned to control levels. MAP and RSNA were strongly (Ϸ90%) negatively correlated before sinoaortic baroreceptor denervation but only 30% negatively correlated on days 1 and 14 and 25% positively correlated on days 1 and 14. These results indicate that low MAP variability results from sinoaortic baroreflex-mediated fluctuations in HR and RSNA that are inversely related and that high MAP variability after sinoaortic baroreceptor denervation is infrequently positively correlated with RSNA. Because MAP variability can be reduced by interventions that block the sympathetic nervous system, 2,3 it appears that MAP variability associated with sinoaortic baroreceptor denervation is mediated largely by a permissive role of peripheral sympathetic nervous system activity. This is especially prominent in the conscious state, in which MAP, HR, and RSNA responses to environmental alerting stimuli are exaggerated.Time series of normal heartbeat (ie, R-R intervals), arterial pressure, and peak intervals of synchronized RSNA display complex nonlinear dynamics, including deterministic chaos. In normal animals subjected to sinoaortic and cardiac baroreceptor denervation, the regulation of arterial pressure 4 -6 (dogs) and RSNA 7 (rats) became more simple, with significant reduction in 2 indices of chaotic behavior, the correlation dimension and greatest Lyapunov exponent. Similarly, the heartbeat 8 of patients and the RSNA 7 of rats with congestive heart failure showed marked reduction in chaotic behavio...