Investigation of skin vasoreactivity and blood flow oscillations in hypertensive patients

In order to evaluate whether arterial hypertension (AH) affects skin microcirculation, 46 newly diagnosed, nevertreated, hypertensive patients and 20 healthy normotensive controls underwent a forearm skin postocclusive reactive hyperaemia (PORH) test, using laser-Doppler flowmetry (LDF). Their resting skin blood flow oscillations (SBFOs) were also investigated using wavelet spectral analyses of skin LDF tracings within six frequency subintervals in the 0.005‐2Hz spectral range. To evaluate whether antihypertensive treatment affects skinmicrocirculation,the same measurements were repeated in 22 of the recruited hypertensive patients after 8W2 weeks of antihypertensive treatment. Significantly reduced PORH, together with significantly higher spectral amplitudes within the majority of the investigated SBFO subintervals, was found in untreated hypertensive patients compared with controls. In the 22 hypertensive patients who completed the follow-up, there was a significant increase in PORH after antihypertensive treatment compared with before (357W178vs.284W214%,respectively,P