High Blood Pressure

"Most serious disease in American life today is high blood pressure." Thus announced Mayo Clinicians Edgar van Nuys Allen and Alfred Washington Adson at the American College of Physicians meeting in Cleveland last week. Every year, they said, "hypertension" kills about 375000 people--twice as many as cancer.

Hypertension strikes youth as well as age, and when it runs in families, "members of the third generation die earlier than [those] ... of the second generation, and those of the second ... die earlier than those of the first." Drs. Allen & Adson admitted that "there is no very good medical treatment for hypertension," that droves of patients run to "physician after physician seeking relief, and . . . large numbers of physicians do likewise. . . . Almost all products so enthusiastically advertised are valueless. A program of adequate rest and recreation, avoidance ... of nervous stresses and strains, the acquisition of a calm peaceful attitude, the use of sedatives, the maintenance of normal weight and the judicious use of drugs ... is as good as any." Hypertension is a disease of the arterial system. The heart pumps blood into the arteries with such force that if a large artery were slashed and a vertical glass tube inserted, the column of blood would spout to a height of almost three feet.

When the delicate artery branches, or arterioles, tighten and dam up the flow of blood in the main arteries, this pressure is greatly increased. Some causes of hypertension : overactivity of the thyroid gland, emotional disturbances, an abnormally large volume of circulating blood, toxemias of pregnancy. Normal blood pressure increases with age, ranges from no to 135 for a normal adult male.* High blood pressure may climb up to 280.

Of itself, high blood pressure produces nothing worse than violent headaches, dizziness, insomnia. Everyone has experienced a rise in his blood pressure during a football game, an examination, a domestic crisis. After several years, continued pressure hardens the arteries, stretches and swells the overburdened heart. Death may result from arteriosclerosis or heart disease.

Three years ago Professor Harry Goldblatt of Western Reserve announced that a large proportion of hypertension is caused by a clogging of the kidneys. When he clamped the kidney arteries of dogs and cut off their blood supply, an unknown "pressor substance" was produced which irritated the adrenal glands, capping the kidneys; they in turn produced constriction of the arterioles throughout the body.

In a great number of hypertensive patients, Dr. Goldblatt discovered choked kidneys similar to those he had produced in dogs. Strangely, in many cases kidney function was undisturbed.

If a hypertensive patient has one dis eased kidney, Dr. Goldblatt can lower his blood pressure by removing it. But where both kidneys are clogged, there is nothing he can do. So, although fellow physicians hail Dr. Goldblatt's work as one of the great medical contributions of the last 20 years, they admit that, so far, nothing much can be done with it.

* Blood pressure is measured by a sphygmomanometer, a kind of barometer which records in millimeters of mercury the pressure of blood above the prevailing barometric pressure.

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