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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (22574)	1/18/2007 3:39:36 PM
From: Biomaven	Respond to of 52153

It's actually worse than blood sugar - it's exceedingly hard to determine whether a specific individual is salt-sensitive or not, partly because of natural variations in BP and errors in BP measurement. So really you have to do repeated trials on each individual, which isn't practical. (See the DASH trial). That's why the general advice to ingest less sodium. There's a statistically significant group response (although not a dramatic one in magnitude) to reduced sodium, and no way right now to determine which individuals will be helped in future by decreased sodium. Hence the general advice to ingest less sodium, although some people appear to get increased BP with reduced sodium, although again this may be an experimental artifact. The only way this will be properly settled in my view is to look at genetic subgroups to identify the salt-sensitive subset. (Blacks tend to be more salt-sensitive than Caucasians, so that perhaps gives some clue as to a genetic link.) Peter