High sodium feed

High sodium diet is usually used to study diet induced hypertension, because increasing circulating sodium level will make cells release water molecules (due to osmotic pressure), thus increasing the pressure on the blood vessel wall and gradually forming hypertension. There are two commonly used high sodium feeds, 4% and 8% sodium chloride feeds. According to different basic feeds, they can be divided into AIN-76 series high sodium feeds and ain-93 series high sodium feeds. Both of the two series of feeds can achieve similar effects.
Hypertension is a disease controlled by multiple genes. At present, the preferred small animal model for hypertension research is rats. Commonly used strains include selectively bred homozygous hypertensive rats (such as SHR and Dahl salt sensitive rats) and outbred strains (such as Sprague Dawley). SHR rats spontaneously increase hypertension in the early life (5-6 weeks) and eventually develop into hypertension. Because its peripheral resistance and normal cardiac output are similar to human hypertension, this strain is considered to be a good model for the study of essential hypertension. It usually takes 4-6 weeks for Dahl salt sensitive rats to produce hypertension when using 8% high salt diet. However, individual weaned Dahl SS rats can rapidly produce hypertension (>180mmHg) in just 2 weeks when feeding.
Relatively speaking, mice are not widely used in hypertension modeling. Even with 8% high salt purified feed, inbred mice such as C57BL/6 can detect elevated blood pressure, but this process takes several months. However, because wild-type mice are easy to obtain and economical, many researchers choose to induce hypertension in reality. At this time, the best choice is 8% high sodium diet.

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