Stroke-prone renovascular hypertensive rat as an animal model for stroke studies: from artery to brain.

High blood pressure is a main risk factor for both initial and recurrent stroke. Compared to the post stroke situation in normotension, the brain lesion is larger in hypertension, and the treatments may not be as effective. Thus, the results from healthy individuals may not be directly applied to the hypertensive. In fact, the high prevalence of hypertension in stroke patients and its devastating effect urge the necessity to integrate arterial hypertension in the study of stroke in order to better mimic the clinical situations. The first step to do so is to have an appropriate hypertensive animal model for stroke studies. Stroke-prone renovascular hypertensive rat (RHRSP) introduced in 1998, is an animal model with acquired hypertension independent of genetic deficiency. The blood pressure begins to increase during the first week after constriction of bilateral renal arteries, and becomes sustained since around the 3rd month. Because the morphological and physiological changes of cerebral arteries are similar to those in hypertensive patients, the rats represent a higher than 60% incidence of spontaneous stroke. The animal model has several advantages: one hundred percent development of hypertension without gene modification, high similarity to human hypertension in cerebrovascular pathology and physiology, and easy establishment with low cost. Thus, the model has been extensively used in the investigation of ischemic stroke, and has been shown as a reliable animal model. This paper reviewed the features of RHRSP and its applications in the treatment and prevention of stroke, as well as the investigations of secondary lesions postischemic stroke.