Blood tests which are used to diagnose the cause of high blood pressure are commenly interfered with by the very medications that we use to treat high blood pressure. We have looked at a blood pressure medication called beta-blockers previously and shown how they affect a blood test used to diagnose a syndrome of high blood pressure called “Primary Hyperaldosteronism”. They were interfering with the blood test and causing the diagnosis to be incorrectly made in excess of 24% of patients investigated. However, withdrawal of these medications and their subsitution with others corrected this analytical error.
We saw during this experiment that one blood test called the plasma renin activity came back to normal before the renin concentration. The converse should hsve been the case if our hypothesis was correct in its entirety. We now wish to investigate an associated system to understand better how this unusual result occurred and to help understand other mechanisms whereby these beta-blockers might be acting on the liver to help control blood pressure.
