Current concepts and perspectives of renal volume regulation in relationship to hypertension.
The renal-body fluid mechanism for arterial pressure control is almost certainly the most primitive of all the pressure-regulating mechanisms in animals. Through the stages of evolution, the system has been greatly improved. Nervous controls provide rapid pressure-control mechanisms that function almost instantaneously, many hours or days before the renal-body fluid mechanism can act fully. The renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system plays another important role: this system ensures that very large changes in salt intake, from as little as one-tenth normal up to as high as 10 times normal, have very little effect on the regulated level of the arterial pressure. Finally, the long-term autoregulatory mechanism helps to dissociate the long-term control of cardiac output from long-term control of arterial pressure; it also makes it possible for extremely slight increases in body fluid volume to cause chronic volume-loading hypertension.
D000450:Aldosterone / Q000502:physiology; D001794:Blood Pressure; D001810:Blood Volume; D004032:Diet; D005110:Extracellular Space / Q000502:physiology; D006706:Homeostasis; D006801:Humans; D006978:Hypertension, Renovascular / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007668:Kidney / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012964:Sodium / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000502:physiology; D014655:Vascular Resistance; D014882:Water-Electrolyte Balance
D000450:Aldosterone; D012964:Sodium