How does renal denervation lower blood pressure and when should this technique be considered for the treatment of hypertension?

Resistant hypertension poses significant health concerns. There are strong demands for new safe therapeutics to control resistant hypertension, while addressing its common causes, specifically poor compliance to lifelong polypharmacy, lifestyle modification and physician inertia. The sympathetic nervous system plays a significant pathophysiological role in hypertension. Surgical sympathectomy for blood pressure reduction is an old but extremely efficacious therapeutic concept, since abandoned, with the dawn of safer contemporary pharmacology era. Recently, clinical studies have revealed promising results for safe and sustained blood pressure reduction with percutaneous renal sympathetic denervation. This is a novel, minimally-invasive, device-based therapy, specifically targeting and ablating the renal artery nerves with radiofrequency waves, without permanent implantation. There are also reported additional benefits in related comorbidities, such as impaired glucose metabolism, renal impairment, left ventricular hypertrophy, heart failure, and others. This review will focus on how selective renal sympathetic denervation works, as well as its present and potential therapeutic indications.