Arteries of the Abdominal Organs

Abstract

J. H. Respinger first described renal artery stenosis in 1777. In 1836 Richard Bright, in London, first associated renal disease with hypertension. Tigerstedt and Bergmann discovered the renal substance which raised blood pressure in rabbits and named it renin. In 1934, the American physiologist Harry G. Goldblatt, in his classic experiments, showed that restricting renal artery flow leads to renal atrophy and hypertension. In the following two decades a number of patients with hypertension underwent nephrectomy. In the beginning of the 1950s, reconstruction of the renal artery was undertaken; Thompson and Smithwick, in 1952, performed the first repair of a renal artery stenosis, using a spleno-renal shunt. Freeman and colleagues did the first renal thrombendarterectomy in 1952, while later De Bakey and associates helped perfect the techniques of renal artery repair.