The device, made by privately held Ardian Inc of Mountain View, California, lowered the top blood pressure reading by an average of 32 points after six months, compared with no change in patients who took the best available medicines.
“There are a lot of questions, but it is very exciting,” said Dr. Suzanne Oparil of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who reviewed the findings presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.
The one-time treatment works by silencing nerves leading into and out of the kidney, which play a central role in the sympathetic nervous system, the body’s “fight or flight” response that can increase heart rate and blood pressure.
Procedures that surgically disrupt these nerves had been shown to lower high blood pressure decades ago, but were abandoned with the advent of drugs that target the renin-angiotensin system, which regulates blood pressure and fluid retention. “Those drugs are good but not perfect,” said Dr Murray Esler of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, whose findings were released online by the Lancet.
