Now scientists are exploring how high salt intake can also make cells throughout the body of females swell, rupture, dump their contents and die, triggering an immune reaction that contributes to chronic high blood pressure. “If you are salt-sensitive, you retain salt, you retain water, you have an increase in volume, you start to stretch things and stretch is bad for cells,” said Dr. Jennifer C. Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.