ACE2 and hypertensive disorder: However, they are in agreement with a study on 2K1C rats which employed western blot and immunohistochemistry to demonstrate that ACE2 is attenuated in the early stages of hypertension (Kim et al., 2016), and a study on subtotal nephrectomized (STNx) rats, which showed that renal ACE2 activity is reduced in acute kidney injury, which contributes to the development of CKD (Velskoska et al., 2010).