Spontaneous Hypertension in the Rat

Abstract

Recent progress in hypertension research is greatly indebted to the exploitation of animal models for human hypertension, such as Okamoto and Aoki’s spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR), Smirk et al. genetically hypertensive rats and Dahl’s salt sensitive rats. Among them, SHR, which were separated by selective inbreeding from rats of Wistar-Kyoto colony at our Department in the early 1960’s [1] and established as an inbred strain in 1969 [2], have been regarded as the best available models for essential hypertension, because they develop “primary” hypertension in 100% of the population without any apparent organic lesions and their hypertension, similar to essential hypertension in hemodynamic characteristics, is followed by various hypertensive cardiovascular diseases in a high incidence. SHR (F_32–33) are now maintained at our laboratory genealogically classified into several substrains with different characteristics, from which we have recently succeeded in the selective breeding of stroke-prone and -resistant SHR [3]. Pathogenesis and complications in SHR and stroke-prone SHR studied up to the present were briefly reviewed and compared with essential hypertension in man.