DEPRESSOR RESPONSES OF THE SPONTANEOUSLY HYPER-TENSIVE RATS TO THE ANTI-HYPERTENSIVE AGENTS

A variety of experimental hypertensions in rats has been available for the evaluation of the anti-hypertensive agents as well as for the mechanism studies of essential hypertension. The spontaneously hypertensive (SH) rat with 100 per cent incidence of heredity has been separated from the Wistar rats (1). Though the hypertension develops in the early stage without certain etiology, the animals in the advanced stage exhibit the vascular lesions such as periarteritis nodosa, nephrosclerosis and cardiac lesions (2-5). Recently, Okamoto et al. (6, 7) and Matsumoto (8) have indicated further some involvement of neural factors in development and maintenance of the hypertension. In order to elucidate pharmacologically the mode of the hypertension in the SH rats, the depressor responses to the anti-hypertensive agents were observed comparatively between in the SH and normotensive (N) rats.