Why do we like salt so much, and how does it cause high blood pressure?

Connecting salt appetite to hypertension in mice with central nervous system deletion of 11β hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2

High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart and circulatory disease and it affects millions of people in the UK. Having too much salt in our diet can lead to high blood pressure, so it’s important that we try to limit our intake. But part of the problem is that, for reasons we don’t yet understand, the human brain drives us to eat salt. Dr Matthew Bailey and his team have discovered that if they delete a particular gene in mice, it causes the animals to eat three times as much salt. Several days later, the mice had higher blood pressure. The gene that had been deleted is involved in controlling a hormone system in the brain. In this project they plan to examine how this system controls salt appetite, and measure blood vessel and kidney function to see if these change with high salt intake and are responsible for the blood pressure to rise. Getting to grips with our appetite for salt could prove vital as we try to tackle one of the most common risk factors for heart disease. Better understanding of how our appetite for salt is regulated and how our body reacts to salt and raise blood pressure, may inform the design of more effective blood pressure medicines.