Serum nitric oxide levels are significantly elevated in hypertensive patients compared to normotensive controls in this population, potentially reflecting an endothelial adaptation to antihypertensive medications.
Essential hypertension is characterised by endothelial dysfunction and increased vascular tone and resistance. The former is the result of imbalance of endothelium derived contracting & relaxing factors. Nitric oxide, which is produced locally by endothelium is crucial for maintaining vascular tone. It is still unclear whether NO is a marker or a mediator for endothelial dysfunction in hypertension and also whether changes in NO concentration occur as primary or secondary events. This study was conducted to study the role of nitric oxide in hypertensive cases and also find out the normal level of serum nitric oxide in this specific population of Konaseema area of East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. The present study was done in Department of Biochemistry, Konaseema Institute of Medical Sciences & Research Foundation, Amalapuram, Andhra Pradesh. A total of 150 hypertensive and non diabetic patients aged between 30-72 years (M:F=1.5:1) was taken for the study. A total of 150 age and sex matched control were taken for comparison. Serum creatinine was measured and hypertensives having elevated serum creatinine (>0.7 mg/dl) were excluded from the study; this was done to rule out any effect of kidney functional status on level of serum nitric oxide. Serum nitrate was measured using colorimetric Griess assay. The data was analyzed using SAS 9.1 Software. The mean serum nitrate in hypertensive patients (43.77 0.29 mol /L) is higher than the controls (38.57 5.02 mol /L) and is statistically significant. Elevated serum nitric oxide level in hypertensives indicates an endothelial cell response to the antihypertensive medications. Serum nitric oxide, thus may be used as a marker for predicting "future hypertensive"; this may allow the physicians to modulate life style of these "future hypertensive" before overt hypertension actually develops. Also, the mean serum nitrate in controls of this study is much different from the other studies; does it indicate that serum nitric oxide value is
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Saha et al. (2013) studied this question.
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