For years, doctors have believed that high blood pressure mainly starts in the kidneys and blood vessels.
But a new study from McGill University suggests another key player may be involved—the brain.
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is one of the world’s biggest health problems. It affects two out of three people over the age of 60 and contributes to around 10 million deaths each year.
Often, it causes no obvious symptoms, but it greatly raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, and other serious conditions.
Standard medicines usually work by relaxing blood vessels or helping the kidneys remove extra salt and water.
Yet about one-third of patients don’t respond well to these treatments. This has left scientists searching for other causes.
The new research shows that eating too much salt may set off a chain reaction in the brain that raises blood pressure.
To study this, researchers gave rats salty water—similar to what humans consume if they regularly eat fast food, bacon, instant noodles, or processed cheese.
They found that the salty diet activated immune cells in a part of the brain, leading to inflammation. This process caused the brain to release more of a hormone called vasopressin, which makes blood pressure go up.
The team used advanced brain imaging to watch these changes in real time, something that only recently became possible with new technology.
According to lead scientist Masha Prager-Khoutorsky, this is strong evidence that the brain can be a starting point for high blood pressure. She says the finding could open the door to new treatments that target the brain instead of just the kidneys and blood vessels.
One important detail is that the researchers chose rats for the study rather than mice. Rats regulate salt and water more like humans do, which makes the results more likely to apply to people. Still, more studies are needed to confirm whether the same brain processes play a role in human hypertension.
The next step for the scientists is to explore whether similar brain-driven inflammation is involved in other forms of high blood pressure, especially the stubborn cases that don’t respond to current medicine.
If so, future therapies may need to focus on calming inflammation in the brain to bring blood pressure under control.
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