Lewis Dahl and the genetics of salt-induced hypertension

The notion that hypertension is caused by a high-salt diet is more than a hundred years old, but much of its history is punctuated by controversy. The earliest study that reported a positive correlation between salt intake and blood pressure in humans was published in 1904 and was refuted just three years later (1). Although this ambiguity was echoed by numerous reports over the next 40 years, the validity of the link was reinforced in the 1940s when a physician named Wallace Kempner successfully treated hypertensive patients with a low-salt diet (2). Other researchers then launched population studies that measured blood pressure in response to the level of salt ingestion.