Increased Red-Cell Sodium-Lithium Countertransport in Normotensive Sons of Hypertensive Parents

Abstract

MOST investigators would agree that both heredity and environment are important determinants in the development of essential hypertension. Among the environmental factors, dietary sodium has a prominent but incompletely defined role. Familial aggregation of levels of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure has been confirmed, but the mode of inheritance is debated. Pickering assembled evidence supporting polygenic inheritance and a unimodal, rather than bimodal, distribution of blood pressure in large populations.¹ Attempts to find an inherited prehypertensive defect or a genetic marker for essential hypertension have not yielded conclusive results. Recently the study of cation transport across red-cell membranes has . . .