Cardiovascular Responses to Acute Mental ‘Stress' in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats

Abstract

Abstract Spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR), aged 7 months (‘manifest’ hypertension) or 10–11 weeks (‘prehypertensive’), and renal hypertensive rats (RHR; ‘nonhereditary’ hypertension were compared with normotensive rats (NCR) concerning cardiovascular responses to mental ‘stress’. Blood pressure and heart rate were followed in pairs of awake SHR—NCR and RHR—NCR, while defence reactions were provoked by alerting stimuli (light, noise, vibrations). The tachycardia, here involving both accentuated sympathetic and centrally suppressed vagal discharge, reflected the intensity of neural activation and the pressuie rise the imposed load on heart and vessels. In both respects the SHR groups responded decidedly stronger than NCR and RHR, also after either adrenergic or vagal cardiac blockade. Since SHR and NCR hearts responded equally to graded vagal stimulations or to isoprenaline, the enhanced tachycardia responses reflected a truly intensified defence reaction in SHR. Further, SHR responded more often to mild stimuli than NCR, suggesting a lower ‘threshold’ for defence reactions, and more frequently with clearcut defence reactions than NCR which exhibited vagal bradycardia responses in 30 %, versus 5 % in SHR. This hyperreactivity and apparent prevalence concerning ‘sympathotonic’ patterns in SHR during alertness, in turn tending to trigger structural vascular adaptation and manifest hypertension, is evidently genetically linked and not secondary to hypertension, being observed particularly in ‘prehypertensive’ SHR but not in RHR.