Enlarge / Three-month baby giraffe of Niger (Giraffa camelopardalis) named "Kano" looks on at the zoological park Zoo de la Fleche in La Fleche, northwestern France, on May 4, 2021. (credit: Jean-Francois MONIER / AFP / Getty Images)
To most people, giraffes are merely adorable, long-necked animals that rank near the top of a zoo visit or a photo-safari bucket list. But to a cardiovascular physiologist, there’s even more to love. Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. Their solutions, only partly understood by scientists so far, involve pressurized organs, altered heart rhythms, blood storage—and the biological equivalent of support stockings.
Giraffes have sky-high blood pressure because of their sky-high heads that, in adults, rise about six meters (almost 20 feet) above the ground—a long, long way for a heart to pump blood against gravity. To have a blood pressure of 110/70 at the brain—about normal for a large mammal—giraffes need a blood pressure at the heart of about 220/180. It doesn’t faze the giraffes, but a pressure like that would cause all sorts of problems for people, from heart failure to kidney failure to swollen ankles and legs.
In people, chronic high blood pressure causes a thickening of the heart muscles. The left ventricle of the heart becomes stiffer and less able to fill again after each stroke, leading to a disease known as diastolic heart failure, characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath and reduced ability to exercise. This type of heart failure is responsible for nearly half of the 6.2 million heart failure cases in the US today.
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