Individual aortic baroreceptors are sensitive to different ranges of blood pressures

Many receptors, including thermal receptors and mechanical receptors, are only activated by stimuli within a clearly defined range of intensities. Differences in the receptive ranges enable individual receptors and their sensory centers to precisely detect the intensity of the stimulus and changes in intensity. Baroreceptors are the sensory terminals of the baroreflex. It is well understood that an increasing number of baroreceptors are recruited to produce afferent action potentials as the blood pressure increases, indicating that individual baroreceptors have different pressure thresholds. The present study revealed that individual baroreceptors could stop their afferent signals when the blood pressure exceeds a certain level, indicating that individual baroreceptors are sensitive to a specific range of blood pressure. The receptive ranges of individual baroreceptors differ in terms of the total range, the lower threshold, and the upper threshold. Of 85 baroreceptors examined in this study, the upper thresholds for about half were within the physiological blood pressure range. These results indicate that supraphysiological blood pressure is unlikely to be encoded by the recruitment of more baroreceptors. Instead, supraphysiological blood pressure levels might be signaled by an increase in the frequency of action potentials or by other mechanisms. In conclusion, our results indicate that rabbit baroreceptors are activated by blood pressure levels within specific receptive ranges. These findings should encourage further studies to examine the role of population coding of blood pressure by baroreceptors in the baroreflex.