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Pressure Sensors

PART 1 How Your Body Adjusts Blood Pressure

To lower or raise your blood pressure, your heart can pump less forcefully or rapidly, fluid can be removed from your bloodstream or added to it, and your blood vessels can dilate or constrict. These functions are controlled by your body in many ways:

Baroreceptors, specialized nerve endings embedded in your heart, aorta, and carotid arteries, send signals to your brain. These signals instruct your brain to dilate or constrict your blood vessels and to decrease or increase heart rate and force of contraction. In this way your blood pressure can be lowered or raised.

Your kidneys can release an enzyme that causes blood vessels to constrict, raising blood pressure.

Your heart can pump more forcefully or more rapidly to pump more blood per minute, increasing blood pressure.

Your kidneys can release a hormone that increases your blood volume and so raises your blood pressure.

PART 2 Baroreceptors

Baroreceptors are sensory nerve endings located in the walls of the heart’s atria, the aortic arch, and the carotid sinuses. They are part of the sympathetic division of your autonomic nervous system, which regulates body processes not under your conscious control. READ MORE

Baroreceptors are stretch receptors: they detect the pressure of the blood flowing through them by monitoring the amount of stretch in the blood vessel walls. When the usual mean arterial blood pressure changes, they act immediately by sending signals to the brain’s medulla oblongata. This then sends signals to the heart and arteries. When blood pressure is too high, heart rate and force of contraction are decreased and arteries are dilated. When blood pressure is too low, heart rate and force of contraction are increased and arteries are constricted. LESS