Functional State of the Microvascular Bed of the Skin in Essential Arterial Hypertension Assessed by Laser Doppler Flowmetry with Amplitude-Frequency Wavelet Analysis of Blood Flow Oscillations

Modern diagnostic technologies provide access to data which until recently were not available to specialists. Laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) with amplitude-frequency wavelet analysis of tissue perfusion oscillations in patients with essential arterial hypertension (AH) revealed two completely opposite functional states of resistive precapillary arterioles. One group of patients (48%) had a significant increase in the sympathetic vascular tone component and vasomotor microvascular endothelial dysfunction (precapillary resistance). The second group of patients (52%), on the contrary, exhibited a significant reduction in myogenic tone accompanied by raised arterial blood inflow and increased blood filling of the venular microcirculatory bloodstream (postcapillary resistance). Since the main target of most pharmaceuticals is the resistive vessels, LDF can be useful for the selection of personalized antihypertensive therapy that considers the functional state of resistive microvessels.