Plasma Noradrenaline Concentration in Hypertensive and Normotensive 40-Year-Old Individuals: Relationship to Plasma Renin Concentration

Abstract

1. Forty-year-old individuals with mild essential hypertension, identified during a survey of a population born in 1936, were investigated. Forty-year-old normotensive subjects, drawn from the same population, served as a control group. 2. Plasma noradrenaline concentration and plasma renin concentration at rest supine and after acute stimulation, as induced by frusemide intravenously and ambulation, did not differ from reference values in the 40-year-old normotensive controls. In the hypertensive group a close correlation (r = 0.77, P less than 0.001) was found between plasma noradrenaline and plasma renin concentration after acute stimulation. 3. Sympathetic nerve activity, as defined by measurements of plasma noradrenaline, is normal in mild essential hypertension. Discrepancies described in the literature are probably related to a lack of comparability between hypertensive and normotensive study populations.

INFLUENCE OF AGE, SEX AND WEIGHT ON MEASUREMENTS OF INTRACELLULAR Na+ AND K+ IN ESSENTIAL HYPERTENSION

“…Thus, the previous findings of altered intracellular cation concentrations in hypertension may represent type I errors (false positives) due to use of inadequate control populations. Such a finding is not unprecedented in hypertension research; witness the controversy over plasma noradrenaline levels which were initially thought to be raised in hypertension but are actually identical in well-matched hypertensive and control populations (Ibsen et al 1979).…”