They create an animal that is entirely SHR, except for a part of one chromosome in a single kidney. This method will tell them whether gene expression in the kidney is responsible for the blood pressure difference between the animals. Why that's exciting is that I would say it's been at least 100 years that people have known that the kidney one way or another affects blood pressure. For example, he said, people with an impeded blood flow to the kidney, perhaps through a narrowing of the renal artery, are hypertensive. Speculation abounds about what causes high blood pressure, Dr. Churchill said, and whether differences in the kidney are the cause or the consequence of high blood pressure.
Nobody is really sure.
They will also use the same kidney specific gene transfer protocol to determine how much genetic differences may affect the regulation of blood pressure. Nobody would care what your blood pressure was if your blood vessels could stand it. What's bad about high blood pressure is some of the smallest blood vessels, the capillaries, cannot withstand high blood pressure, and if they're exposed to it, they blow out. When a physician peers into the eye of a patient with a penlight, he or she is actually conducting a test for high blood pressure, he said. Your retina is one of the only places in your body where you can directly see capillaries.