Summary
Pretreatment of dogs with two doses of 0.1 mg/kg reserpine, given 72 and 48 hours before the experiment, did not alter the bleeding volume, i.e., the volume of blood that can be withdrawn before the arterial blood pressure falls to 40 mm Hg, or the maximal volume of blood expelled by the animal during maintained hypotension.
The uptake of blood during the hypotension was considerably slowed by pretreatment with reserpine. Control animals had taken up 40% of the maximally shed volume after 175 minutes at 40 mm Hg, but no animal pretreated with reserpine had taken up 40% of the maximally shed blood after 360 minutes. The large vessel hematocrit in both groups of animals fell during hemorrhage, but while the hematocrit of the control animals increased again during the hypotension, that of the animals pretreated with reserpine remained low for the duration of the hypotension.
It is concluded that impairment or blockade of impulse transmission in the sympathetic nervous system by reserpine did not impair the ability of the animals to compensate for loss of blood volume. It did, however, exert a marked “stabilizing” effect on the circulation during hypotension. It is likely that the observed “stability” of the circulation is due to the effect of reserpine upon changes in intracapillary pressure occurring normally during oligemic hypotension and to the movement of fluid across the capillary membrane resulting therefrom.
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Dedicated to Professor Otto Krayer in honor of his 65th birthday.
This work was supported by funds from the Massachusetts Heart Association, from the Milton Fund of Harvard University, and from USPHS grant H-2204.
Part of the results reported here were presented to the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics during the 1963 Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
We wish to thank Mrs. Evelyne Shechter and Mr. David Jones for their assistance in these experiments.
NATO Research Fellow on leave of absence from the University of the Saarland in Homburg/Saar, Germany.
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Seifen, E., Flacke, W. & Alper, M.H. The influence of reserpine pretreatment upon the hemodynamics of dogs during hemorrhagic hypotension. Naunyn - Schmiedebergs Arch 248, 27–38 (1964). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00247057
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00247057