In recent years, the prevalence of hypertension has been increasing year by year. Renal artery sympathetic nerve ablation (RDN) is an effective treatment for hypertension and is expected to become a supplement to drug therapy with its advantages of higher safety and better antihypertensive effect. Meanwhile, there is a strong demand for clinical application of RDN devices, and the potential market space is vast.

 RDN has obvious clinical advantages

Human blood pressure is controlled by signals from multiple systems in the body (such as the nervous system, circulatory system, endocrine system, etc.). A person is considered to have hypertension if the office systolic blood pressure is not less than 140 mmHg and/or the office diastolic blood pressure is not less than 90 mmHg after several repeated measurements.

 Currently, RDN is one of the more widely studied and clinically well-documented interventional therapies for hypertension. The kidney has a central role in the long-term regulation of blood pressure. Increased renal sympathetic excitability is an important neural mechanism that causes hypertension, and it can raise blood pressure through both efferent and afferent fibers. The hypotensive effect of RDN is closely related to the role of efferent and afferent fibers of renal sympathetic nerve, which can reduce the overactive renal sympathetic nerve excitability in hypertensive patients by removing the efferent and afferent fibers of renal sympathetic nerve and blocking the signal transmission between the brain and renal sympathetic nerve, thus lowering blood pressure.

RDN has several advantages in the field of hypertension treatment compared to drug therapy and lifestyle interventions. For example, RNA has an all-day blood pressure lowering effect and is not affected by patient behavior. Patients are usually at higher risk for cardiovascular events in the early morning and during the night, whereas with RDN treatment, patients' blood pressure can be controlled consistently. At the same time, the safety profile of the RDN is good. Because RDN does not involve permanent implantation, it is less invasive and causes relatively few side effects, and patients tend to experience no postoperative complications and have faster wound recovery. In addition, RDN effectively solves the problem of poor patient compliance.

Wide market space for RDN devices

Hypertension is a disease highly correlated with age and lifestyle. With the increasing aging of the population, the prevalence of hypertension in China is on the rise year by year. in July 2019, the Health China Action (2019-2030) formulated and issued by the Health China Action Promotion Committee shows that there are 270 million hypertensive patients nationwide. CIMB data show that in 2021, the number of patients with controllable hypertension, uncontrolled hypertension and persistent hypertension in China will be about 76 million, 205 million and 50 million respectively, accounting for 23%, 62% and 15% respectively.

The huge number of hypertensive patient population has a huge demand for interventional treatments for hypertension such as RDN. For example, patients with controllable hypertension and uncontrolled hypertension are mostly young people, who tend to be busy, lead irregular lives, have poor medication compliance, and have some resistance to lifelong medication. RDN treatment can not only help these patients lower their blood pressure to a safe range, but also effectively reduce their medication burden. At the same time, the medication burden for patients with intractable hypertension is also very high. For these patients, RDN does not help them to get rid of medication, but it helps to reduce the physical and psychological burden of taking large amounts of medication.