Affiliations: Instituto de Biopatologia Química, Unidade de Biopatologia Vascular – Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal | Instituto de Medicina Preventiva, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal | Serviço de Medicina I, Hospital de Santa Maria, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal | Serviço de Nefrologia, Hospital de Santa Maria, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal
Note: [] Corresponding author: Filomena A. Carvalho, Instituto de Biopatologia Química, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, Edifício Egas Moniz, Av. Prof. Egas Moniz, 1649-028 Lisboa, Portugal. E-mail: filomenacarvalho@fm.ul.pt.
Abstract: We stimulated human erythrocytes obtained from patients with hypercholesterolemia (HC; n=42), renal transplantation (RT; n=18) and hypertension (HT; n=10) with acetylcholine (ACh 10 μM) and measured the amperometric NO production, comparing with the NO levels achieved on erythrocytes of healthy persons (n=27). We also measured the hemoglobin, hematocrit, erythrocyte aggregation, erythrocyte deformability, plasma viscosity and fibrinogen concentration from human blood samples. The erythrocytes NO levels were of 2.5±0.7 nM (P=0.038, HC), 2.4±1.1 nM (RT) and 2.2±0.8 nM (HT) against the 2.0±0.8 nM for the control groups. For each group and at each shear stress value, the erythrocytes deformability decreases with the increase of the NO concentration after ACh stimulation. We observed a significant increase of the control values on the erythrocyte aggregation results on each patient group. Besides the lower erythrocyte deformability obtained on HC, RT and HT blood samples, the erythrocytes produced higher NO levels after ACh stimulation than the healthy ones. The power of erythrocyte hemorheological behaviour could be compensated by the NO production at the presence of acetylcholine. We can hypothesises that cholinergic drugs could be used as co-adjuvants of specific therapeutics compounds on these studied diseases.
