Prenatal high-salt diet in the Sprague-Dawley rat programs blood pressure and heart rate hyperresponsiveness to stress in adult female offspring

Several animal models have been developed to study fetal programming of hypertension. One model involves feeding high-salt (HS) diet to rats before and during pregnancy, during lactation, and after weaning for 10 days. In the present investigation, we limited HS diet to the prenatal period in an attempt to find a narrower critical window for fetal programming. The HS diet did not result in low-birth weight offspring. In the adult offspring, radiotelemetry was used to assess blood pressure and heart rate in the conscious unstressed state. As adults, the HS offspring were not hypertensive compared with normal-salt (NS) control animals. However, the pressor and tachycardic responses to 1-h of restraint were significantly enhanced in HS female offspring, and recovery after restraint was delayed. This was accompanied by an increase in relative expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) mRNA in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus during basal and stressed conditions. There was no augmented stress response or relative increase in CRH mRNA in adult HS male offspring. When challenged with 1 wk of 8% NaCl diet as adults, neither HS male nor female offspring exhibited salt sensitivity compared with NS groups. These data show that a high-salt diet limited to the prenatal period is not sufficient to program hypertension in adult offspring. However, this narrower critical period is sufficient to imprint a lasting hyperresponsiveness to stress, at least in adult female offspring. These data indicate that excessive maternal salt intake during pregnancy can adversely affect the cardiovascular health of adult offspring.