Some people can pour table salt on their meals for years without suffering negative consequences.
For others, habitual use of salt is poisonous, causing blood pressure to skyrocket and increasing the risk of heart disease, stroke or kidney failure. Richard Lifton , a Hughes investigator at Yale University, thinks the answer is to be found in each person's genes. In studying newborn infants with a genetic disorder that causes low blood pressure, Lifton's research team traced the cause of the disorder to an abnormal protein that helps to process sodium in the kidney. Absence of the protein leads to a rare but mild low blood pressure disorder in newborns that results in loss of salt from the blood. The research may also explain how hypertension develops in the 50 million Americans with the disease.