23 February 2011

Sodium and NO production

Hello All,
A nutrition list-serv that I am a member of posted a link to an article that I found very interesting and thought it went along with a few of our discussions on Monday. The link for the article is below.


The title is one that grabs the reader: diet soda may raise the odds of vascular events; salt linked to stroke risk. It reminded me of the thought we had in class regarding the media. Lay articles that use a little bit of truth to focus on in order to increase fear/interest in the article or website. At the end of this brief article, you realize it's not the diet soda in the diet that caused increased risk of cerebral vascular events but sodium content of the entire diet.

We are all aware of the affects sodium intake has on stimulating the renin-angiotensin system, thus increasing sodium reabsorption, leading to increased intervascular volume and resulting in hypertension. I started to wonder sodium's influence on the inflammatory system. This brought me to a a review article: Salt Intake, Endothelial Cell Signaling and Progression of Kidney Disease. It discusses the impact salt intake can have on endothelial signaling, specifically the effects on NO. Increased salt intake led to impairment of the negative feedback system leading to over expression of NOS eventually leading to organ damage.

Here is the brief diagram they proposed: increased blood flow leads to expression of p38 and MAPK, increasing TGF-beta 1 and thus increasing NO expression.

FIG2.gif


It seems that sodium has a direct effect on hypertension, but there are many pathways that we have yet to discover, regarding inflammation and CVAs.


Sanders, P. Salt Intake, Endothelial Cell Signaling and Progression of Kidney Disease. Hypertension. 2004;43:142-146.




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