New post up on Cardiology Medscape: Lessons learned from the failure of Renal denervation for high blood pressure

Most people come by it honestly. They eat too much, move too little, skimp on sleep, take on too much stress and then succumb to buying larger clothes. The word we use in medicine is insidious. High blood pressure (hypertension – HTN) is one of the leading cardiovascular problems of this time. Some have called treating HTN the holy grail of medicine. Think about why this may be. The human heart contracts 100,000 times per day. Each beat delivers a pressure load to the thousands of arteries in the body. Over days, weeks, months, years and decades, small elevations of high pressure can have devastating wear and tear effects. This is why high blood pressure leads to stroke (damage to brain vessels), kidney failure (damage to kidney vessels) and heart attack (damage to coronary arteries), among other problems. It’s easy to see why treating high blood pressure is important. And the best way to treat high blood pressure is to exercise, eat well, sleep well and avoid obesity. Medicines are second-line choices. But even then, many patients remain hypertensive. This led to an idea. What if we could disconnect adrenaline-carrying nerves from the kidney–an organ central to blood pressure control? Renal denervation showed promise. The technique involved placing an ablation catheter, similar to what we use in the EP lab, up to the kidney arteries and then deliver circular burns on the inside of the kidney vessels. These lesions would damage/reduce neural outputs to and f...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs