CORTISONE AND ACTH IN ESSENTIAL HYPERTENSION

Abstract

TREATMENT of normotensive patients with cortisone or pituitary adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) has sometimes resulted in definite increases of arterial pressure.¹In a hypertensive patient with dermatomyositis, ACTH administration has induced a state resembling hypertensive encephalopathy.²A few patients with hypertension have been described as showing some decrease in pressure after treatment with cortisone, so that it has been suggested that cortisone is. paradoxically, sometimes antipressor.³ Experimentally, many of the pathological changes elicited by use of desoxycorticosterone in rats are inhibited or reversed by treatment with adrenal cortex extracts or with ACTH.⁴These lesions include an arterial disease which is similar to that observed in human beings suffering from severe hypertension.⁵Thus, quite apart from the possible antipressor effects of cortisone or ACTH, there is a basis for supposing that they might favorably influence hypertensive vascular disease as such. Our purpose here is to record effects