Salt remains main culprit in hypertension

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-22 11:15

People should pay particular attention to the sodium content of breads.

People with high blood pressure that isn't controlled by multiple medications are likely eating too much salt, new findings in the journal Hypertension show.

Individuals with so-called resistant hypertension showed sharp reductions in their blood pressure when they dramatically cut their salt intake, Dr Eduardo Pimenta of the University of Queensland School of Medicine in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues found.

"It was an amazingly large reduction in blood pressure," says Dr Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. Appel estimated that 10 to 20 percent of people have resistant hypertension, meaning they are taking three or more blood pressure medications but their blood pressure is still too high.

But the reductions in sodium intake in Pimenta's study - down to 1.15 grams per day - would be very tough for people to achieve in a real-world setting, Appel adds. (Sodium levels in food are correlated with salt levels.) "You can advise people to reduce sodium but the food supply has so much sodium it's very difficult for individuals to do this on their own."

Pimenta and his team had 12 people with resistant hypertension alternate between low and high sodium diets for a week each, with a two-week "washout" period between the diets.

Study participants' initial average systolic blood pressure, the top number in a blood pressure reading, was 145.8 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg), while diastolic pressure, the lower reading, was 83.9 mm Hg. They were taking an average of 3.4 anti-hypertensive medications each.

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