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Mapping Renal Innervations by Renal Nerve Stimulation and Characterizations of Blood Pressure Response Patterns

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Abstract

Increased sympathetic nervous activity is one of main contributors to pathogenesis and progression of hypertension. Renal denervation (RDN) has been demonstrated as a potential therapy for treatment of hypertension; however, lack of indicators of intra-/post-procedure results in inconsistent clinical outcomes. Renal nerve stimulation (RNS), a simple and promising method, could evoke elevated blood pressure as an intraoperative indicator for RDN. But related researches on patterns of blood pressure responses to RNS are still incomplete. To investigate and categorize the phenotypes of blood pressure response to RNS and heart rate alteration before and after RNS, 24 Chinese Kunming dogs were used to perform RNS from bifurcation to ostium of renal arteries after angiography, and a total of 483 stimulated sites were complete. We identified five different patterns of blood pressure response to RNS in 483 stimulated sites, (1) continuous ascending and finally keeping steady above baseline (26.9%), (2) declining and then rising over baseline (11.8%), (3) declining and then rising but below baseline (14.5%), (4) fluctuating in the vicinity of baseline (39.5%), and (5) continuous declining and finally keeping steady below baseline (7.2%), and found no difference in RR intervals among five blood pressure responses before and after renal nerve stimulation. Renal nerve stimulation could elicit different patterns of blood pressure response, which could potentially assist in distinguishing sympathetic-excitatory sites and sympathetic-inhibitory sites from mixed nerve components, which might help to improve the efficacy of RDN.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Changzhi Zhang and Jie Yang for their help in intervention procedures.

Funding

This work was supported by the General Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.82000471 and General Project from Chongqing Municipal Health Bureau under Grant No.2016MSXM023.

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Author notes

  1. Hao Zhou and Yidan Li contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cardiology, Chongqing Cardiac Arrhythmias Therapeutic Service Center, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, No. 288 Tianwen Avenue, Nan’an District, Chongqing, China

    Hao Zhou, Yidan Li, Yanping Xu, Hang Liu, Yinchuan Lai, Kunyue Tan, Xueyuan Liu, Zhenhong Ou, Weijie Chen, Huaan Du, Zengzhang Liu & Yuehui Yin

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  1. Hao Zhou
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  2. Yidan Li
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Contributions

HZ, YL, YX, HL, WC, LS, ZL, and YY designed this experiment. YL, YX, KT, and XL prepared and recorded the intervention procedure. HZ, HL, YL, ZO, and WC performed the intervention procedure. HZ, YL, YX, HL, and ZO collected the data, and all authors participated in data analysis. HZ, YL, and YY composed this paper. All authors reviewed and approved for the final version of manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuehui Yin.

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Ethics Approval

The experimental protocol was approved by the Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee of Chongqing Medical University, in accordance with the guidelines of National Institutes of Health for the care and use of laboratory animals.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Associate Editor Marat Fudim oversaw the review of this article

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The original version of this article was revised: An error in the text has been corrected on page 3, first paragraph of the section "Data Collection and Processing", Line 5 of this article as originally published.

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Zhou, H., Li, Y., Xu, Y. et al. Mapping Renal Innervations by Renal Nerve Stimulation and Characterizations of Blood Pressure Response Patterns. J. of Cardiovasc. Trans. Res. 15, 29–37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12265-021-10149-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12265-021-10149-1

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