Is the stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rat relevant to the study of strokes in man?
In 1958, before the inbred spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) was created, Stamler [94] had noted that spontaneous strokes did not occur in any experimental animal in the non-malignant phase of hypertension. However, in the stroke-prone SHR (SHRSP), we now have an animal which will usually die spontaneously with either massive cerebral haemorrhage or infarction. It is appropriate to ask ‘why?’. Johansson [95] reported that cerebral arteries and arterioles in SHR were smaller in internal diameter than in Wistar–Kyoto (WKY) rats. Baumbach and Hajdu [96] confirmed this and measured the external diameter of rat cerebral arterioles after dilating them fully with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. They observed that SHR arterioles had a smaller diameter than corresponding arterioles from WKY rats when compared at the same ages. This explains why ligation of the main cerebral arteries of SHR and SHRSP causes greater reduction in cerebral blood flow and disturbance of brain function than ligat
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