CLOSING IN ON HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
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Nearly all of us know someone who has had a stroke. According to the American Heart Association high blood pressure (hypertension) killed more than 50,000 Americans per year. Uncontrolled high blood pressure can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure or kidney failure. This is why high blood pressure is often called the "silent killer."
• About 65 million Americans aged 20 and older have it.
• Nearly one in three adults have it and about one third of them don't know they have it.
Fortunately, a lot can be done about managing high blood pressure.
There is also a lot we can do to help others manage it. To give a friend or family member details on hypertension management you might want to send a e-greeting card complete with animation and music, from the American Heart Association website; that way you can truly wish someone well.
While blood pressure is being managed we can all dream about the future when, according to researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, we might have a gene therapy that will maintain blood pressure at a healthy level for up to four months.
In a report released online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists, led by Dr. Bert O'Malley, chair of the BCM department of molecular and cellular biology, say that they've found a way to introduced genes into cells that will relax muscles in blood vessels, increasing the vessels' diameters, and reducing the manner in which the vessels react to agents that can constrict those vessels. This is what blood pressure medicines do presently but their effect is for much shorter periods of time.
Baylor scientists have found that gene therapy might reduce organ damage that often results from high blood pressure. The therapy also improves the manner in which the kidney eliminates sodium or salt from the body and inhibits other systems, such as the sympathetic nervous system, which is believed to be linked to development of high blood pressure.
Gene therapy is the treatment of disease by replacing, altering, or supplementing a gene that is absent or abnormal and whose absence or abnormality is responsible for a disease; it involves the insertion of normal DNA directly into cells to correct a genetic defect.
Still in its infancy gene therapies are still very controversial because of ethical and legal questions that arise with any procedures based on the manipulation of the human genome. A genome is entire DNA of an organism. DNA carry information for making all the proteins required by all organisms. These proteins determine, among other things, how the organism looks, how well its body metabolizes food or fights infection, and sometimes even how it behaves.
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