Chronic losartan treatment decreases angiotensin II-mediated facilitation of noradrenaline release in the caudal artery of spontaneously hypertensive rats.

Sympathetic activity is modulated by angiotensin II (AII), both at pre- and postsynaptic level in the rat caudal artery. In the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR), this artery receives more dense sympathetic innervation than blood vessels of normotensive strains. This fact seems to be linked to the enhanced pressor responses elicited by noradrenaline in SHR. In this work we describe, in the SHR, the effect of a chronic treatment with the angiotensin II AT1-receptor antagonist, losartan, in modulating noradrenergic mechanisms involved in caudal artery contraction. The effect of losartan is compared to that of captopril, given at doses leading to a similar decrease of both arterial blood pressure and left ventricular hypertrophy. The contractile response of caudal artery rings induced by endogenous noradrenaline released by low frequency transmural nerve stimulation (TNS) has been studied. Under our conditions, TNS (0.5-1 Hz) induced higher contractile responses in SHR treated with losartan than in the control and captopril-treated groups. This difference seems to be due to an increase of the postsynaptic effect of noradrenaline (NA) rather than to an increase of noradrenaline release from sympathetic endings, since i) DE50 value for NA was lower in losartan-treated SHR than in the other groups, and ii) AII induced a dose-dependent increase of TNS-evoked release of radioactivity from caudal artery segments loaded with [3H]-NA, in both control and captopril-treated groups but had no effect in the losartan-treated group. These results show that chronic treatment with losartan, although slightly enhancing the pressor effect of NA at postsynaptic level, fully supresses the facilitatory role of AII on NA release.