End-organ involvement and calcium antagonist therapy: animal studies

Hypertension is a complex disease, the treatment of which should not only lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure but also attenuate the secondary consequences of the disease. These include vascular injury (including atherosclerosis), stroke, left ventricular hypertrophy, and renal damage. To establish whether the long-acting, vascular-selective calcium antagonist amlodipine attenuates some of these secondary consequences of hypertension, 5-week-old stroke-prone hypertensive and 8-week-old spontaneously hypertensive rats were treated (orally) with 5 mg/kg/day and 10 mg/kg/day amlodipine, respectively, for 30 weeks. The treatment resulted in a significant lowering of systolic blood pressure, accompanied by reduced cardiac hypertrophy and prolonged survival. Evidence for a protective effect of amlodipine on the vasculature was obtained by treating cholesterol-fed rabbits with 1-5 mg/kg/body weight/day. This resulted in a reduction in vascular Ca2+ overloading and a reduced incidence of sudanophilic lesion formation. Protection against ischemia-induced changes in the myocardium included a reduction in the ischemia-induced externalization of endothelin-1 binding sites.