Head beats heart in race to stop pulses racing, say Melbourne scientists

TARGETING a person’s brain rather than their heart or kidneys may be the secret to correcting dangerous blood pressure following a new discovery by Melbourne researchers.

TARGETING a person’s brain rather than their heart or kidneys may be the secret to correcting dangerous blood pressure following a new discovery by Melbourne researchers.

In the same way a thermostat is used to set a temperature in a building, a Melbourne team have uncovered a “central set-point” in the human brain they believe it uses to regulate a person’s blood pressure.

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Targeting a person’s brain rather than their heart or kidneys may be the secret to correcting dangerous blood pressure, a new study by Melbourne researchers has revealed. Picture: File.

The Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute scientists are now undertaking further tests to discover how the brain sets a persons’ blood pressure level in the hope of new treatments that can lower dangerous levels.

While decades of blood pressure research has focused on kidneys and the hormones they release, Baker researcher Prof Vaughan Macefield said understanding the role played by the brain could offer a new drug-free way of controlling raised levels.

“Through imaging the brain we have shown that people with low blood pressure have different activity in certain parts of the brain that we know control blood pressure,” he said.

“The lower your blood pressure, the greater the blood flow in these particular regions of the brain.

“It is early days now, but we are certainly interested in identifying all the network of the brain involved in blood pressure such that we can target specific areas and thereby control blood pressure.”

While the full results of the research are yet to be published, Prof Macefield said brain scans showed healthy study participants with the lowest blood pressure had the highest blood flows in the rostral ventrolateral medulla region — the same “primitive” area that controls heart rate, breathing, and actions such as a dead fish’s gasping.

The team is now conducting a further examination into “higher” areas of the brains of people with high blood pressure to determine if other areas of the brain related to stress and anxiety — which are known to influence blood pressure — are linked.

The experiments also so weak electrical stimulation into the higher areas of the brain to see if it impacts on the blood pressure.