A new method for determination of the systolic blood pressure in conscious rats

Blood Pressure Measurements in the Conscious Rat

“…Regarding the equipment working with water plethysmography on the rat's tail, we experienced that it was too difficult and time-consuming to operate. Nearly the same experiences were gained by Hermansen (1970). The disadvantages both of the invasive and the water plethysmographic methods are avoidable by committing to the photo pick-up, sphygmomanometric method.…”

“…Swales & Tange (1970), Nimwegen, Van Eijhsbergen, Van Boter & Mullink (1970) measured blood pressure in anaesthetized rats. However, the report of Hermansen (1970). describing measurements o n conscious rats, inspired us t o make o u r o w n device.…”

Influence of nitric oxide-mediated vasodilation on the blood pressure measured with the tail-cuff method in the rat

“…mercury-in-rubber plethysmograph [7], Doppler effect [8][9][10][11], photoelectric [12][13][14][15], impedance [16], microphonic [17][18][19], and piezoelectric pulse detectors [20][21][22][23], permitted to take Inf and Def readings, but the Def values were overwhelmingly used to estimate SBP. Usually no reasons were given for this election, although for example Bun˜ag [29] indicated his preference for the Def cycle because the animal was more mobile during the Inf cycle and the possibility of an erroneous reading due to noisy signals was increased.…”

“…Several methods of flow/pulse detection have been described in addition to the original water plethysmograph [2] or modifications thereof [3][4][5][6]: mercury-in-rubber plethysmograph [7], Doppler effect [8][9][10][11], photoelectric [12][13][14][15], impedance [16], microphonic [17][18][19], and piezoelectric pulse detectors [20][21][22][23], this last being the most widely employed.…”

“…However, in a revision of the bibliography specifically related to methodology of BP measurement, pulse/flow reappearance is the value overwhelmingly taken as representative of SBP [3,7,12,24], even in papers which performed and reported both readings [25][26][27][28], but no reason was given for this election.…”