Prenatal high-salt diet in the Sprague-Dawley rat programs blood pressure and heart rate hyperresponsiveness to stress in adult female offspring.

Several animal models have been developed to study fetal programming of hypertension. One model involves feeding high-salt (HS) diet to rats before and during pregnancy, during lactation, and after weaning for 10 days. In the present investigation, we limited HS diet to the prenatal period in an attempt to find a narrower critical window for fetal programming.