High salt intake causes adverse fetal programming--vascular effects beyond blood pressure

Abstract

High salt intake in pregnant rats has long-lasting effects on the modeling of central and muscular arteries in the offspring independent of postnatal salt intake and BP. Circulating MBG and ADMA and local oxidative stress correlate with the adverse vascular modeling.

High-salt diets during pregnancy increases renal vascular reactivity due to altered soluble guanylyl cyclase-related pathways in rat offspring

“…The present study showed that the expression of PKGIα was not changed in the HS group, indicating that the PKG functionality in the renal interlobar arteries of the HS offspring was unchanged. Previous studies and our reports showed that various prenatal insults, including maternal malnutrition and exposure to toxic chemicals like nicotine, may increase risks for hypertension in developmental origins [9,23,32]. The underlying mechanisms to be studied include altered renin-angiotensin pathways [12,33].…”

“…To further test and confirm the results, western blotting analysis was performed, showing that the protein expression of sGC β1 and sGC β2 in the HS interlobar arteries was significantly reduced compared with that in the NS. One previous study [23], focused on the aorta of 12-week-old HS offspring, showed that expression of sGC β1 was reduced while sGC β2 did not change. sGC β2 was reported to be richly expressed in the kidney [27,28].…”

“…One early study suggested that there was no significant difference in expression of eNOS in the aorta tissue between the NS and HS offspring [23]. Notably, the aorta is large blood vessel, while renal interlobar arteries are small ones.…”

A maternal high salt diet disturbs cardiac and vascular function of offspring

“…Maternal malnutrition has been observed to not only increase the salt sensitivity of blood pressure of offspring [35], but to also impair their vasodilatory response to NO [5,40]. A high salt intake during pregnancy has also been found to raise offspring BP [6,17] and cause a remodeling of heart and arteries in the offspring independent of postnatal salt intake and the BP of the pregnant dams [10,37]. However, it has remained unclear whether a maternal high salt diet may alter vascular or cardiac function of offspring.…”

Antenatal excessive sodium intake induces adverse vascular remodelling in offspring

“…In an interesting paper [12] published in the present issue of NDT, Dr Piecha et al addressed this issue by evaluating the morphological effects on the vasculature of offspring after high salt intake of rat dams during pregnancy. For this purpose, Sprague-Dawley rats were fed a standard rodent diet with a low-normal (0.15%) or high (8.0%) salt content during pregnancy and lactation.…”