How's Your Blood Pressure?

If your doctor tells you that you have a blood pressure of 130, he means that you're all right on that score. (Normal adult blood pressure: 110 to 150.) He also means that the pressure in your arteries will drive up a column of mercury 130 millimetres high, or a column of water about five feet ten inches high. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, causes headaches, dizziness, insomnia, leads eventually to hardened arteries and overburdened hearts. Hypertension kills more people a year--some 375,000 in the U. S. --than cancer. Specialists call patients with high blood pressure "hypertensives." Dr. Irvine H. Page did not bother with these ABCs of the malady when last week he delivered a lecture in Manhattan on "The Nature and Treatment of Hypertension." Dr. Page, a top-notch high pressure man from Indianapolis, showed that great strides have been taken in his specialty in the short space of seven years. Doctors used to take a defeatist view of hypertension, ascribed it to the "mere ravages of physiologic aging." Treatment consisted mostly in keeping patients relaxed and calm by persuasion and drugs. Now there is something better.

Nerves, endocrine glands and liver are all involved in hypertension. But apparently it's the kidneys that count most. The typical hypertensive has clogged kidneys ; his nerves and glands are often perfectly sound.

By a series of ingenious experiments, researchers found renin, an organic chemical manufactured by the kidneys, which raised the blood pressure of animals. They also found an activator in the blood plasma which enabled renin to work. The combination of renin and this activator was dubbed angiotonin. As a working hypothesis, angiotonin was marked as the chemical cause of high pressure. Further experiments showed that normal kidneys probably manufacture an "inhibitor" substance, which destroys or neutralizes surplus angiotonin, keeps the pressure within normal bounds. Two research teams, including Dr. Page's in Indianapolis, recovered from kidney extract inhibitors which lowered the pressure of animals 50 to 100 points.

Then, at last, it was time to see whether the inhibitors would give relief to hypertensive humans. For the past year 17 lucky patients of Dr. Page's have been getting inhibitor injections. In general, their pressures have been lowered and kept down, their headaches, chest pains and shortness of breath have disappeared, "their feeling of well-being is evident." Hypertensives with impaired vision due to blood congestion in the eyes have been greatly improved.

"As time has passed," concluded Dr. Page, "the extracts have become more pure and more potent and the results in the patient have been correspondingly more regular and definite. That arterial blood pressure can be lowered . . . and kept down for months or years seems beyond doubt, but how much ultimate benefit this will be to the patient . . . time and work alone can tell."

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