Nerd News

A recent research by scientists at the University of Erlangen shed some new light on the relationship of salt intake with bodily processes and blood pressure.

These scientists have detected a new storage area in the skin for salt. Salt is mainly stored in the cells and the interstitium (an area between the cells in the body). The researchers discovered that a high salt intake in rats lead to an accumulation of salt in the interstitium in the skin and the process of storing these salt in the interstitium is regulated by the special white cells called macrophages.

There's a gene regulator within these macrophages that activates when there is a high salt intake and then turns on a gene that produces lymphatic blood vessels, thus lymphatic vessels increase with a high-salt diet. However, when the macrophages are depleted, the rats were not able to store their salt and thus they became hypertensive.

However, the scientists were not able to completely understand the relevance of these processes to humans.

Posted by sexy_geek at 6:42 AM