ABSTRACT
Just as essential hypertension may be broken down by reductionist thinking into a number of coincident mechanisms of varying importance, so too can the techniques employed in producing elevated blood pressure in an animal model vary widely. Accordingly, they range, at one extreme, from the purely physical manipulation of direct interference with renal blood supply or the chemical intervention of changing the balance in ionic equilibria, to the purely psychological manipulation of introducing some type of noxious stimuli to a sensitive animal's environment. Running between these extremes are a number of other interventions in the animal's cardiovascular homeostasis. Also included along this range of models are the breeding manipulations involving spontaneous occurrence of an elevated blood pressure, or susceptibility to such, representing genetic selection for mechanisms possibly the same as, or similar to, one or more
of the above. Furthermore, it appears that the physiological end results of the various techniques are interdependent, and in many cases involve the same communication pathways for information flow within the body.
