Increased renal epithelial na channel expression and activity correlate with elevation of blood pressure in spontaneously hypertensive rats.

Elevation of blood pressure with age is one of the hallmarks of hypertension in both males and females. This study examined transcriptomic profiles in the kidney of 12-, 40-, and 80-week-old spontaneously hypertensive rats and 4 recombinant inbred strains in search for functional genetic elements supporting temporal dynamics of blood pressure elevation. We found that both in males and females of spontaneously hypertensive rats and hypertensive recombinant inbred strains age-dependent blood pressure increment was accompanied by 50% heightened expression of epithelial sodium channel β- and γ-subunits. Epithelial sodium channel subunit expression correlated positively with blood pressure but correlated negatively with renin expression. Increased epithelial sodium channel activity was observed in cultured epithelial cells isolated from the kidney medulla of 80-week-old spontaneously hypertensive rats but not in age-matched normotensive Wistar Kyoto. This difference remained evident after 24-hour treatment with aldosterone. 22Na uptake in the perfused kidney medulla was increased whereas the urinary Na/K ratio was decreased in old spontaneously hypertensive rats compared with normotensive controls. The difference was eliminated by the administration of epithelial sodium channel inhibitor benzamil. Observations in recombinant inbred strains representing various mixtures of parental hypertensive and normotensive genomes suggest that Scnn1g and Scnn1b genes themselves are not implicated in heightened expression and that the increased expression is neither secondary nor required for a partial elevation of blood pressure in contrast to spontaneously hypertensive rats. We suggest that spontaneously hypertensive rats display an intact negative feed-back between renin-angiotensin-system and epithelial Na channel activity whose upregulated expression is supported by a yet unknown mechanism.