AGE & CONTROL OF CUTAN VASOCONSTRICT SKIN COOLING & REG OF ALPHA 2C RECEPTORS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. When a person is exposed to a cold environment, the body conserves heat by constricting blood vessels in the skin. This reduces the flow of warm blood through cold skin. However, aging reduces the ability of the skin's blood vessels to constrict. This causes older individuals to have a higher skin blood flow in the cold and makes them more vulnerable to heat loss. The purpose of this project is to examine the mechanisms responsible for vasoconstriction induced by local cooling of the skin. The project will also explore how aging affects those mechanisms. The goals of this study are to 1) characterize the neural components (sympathetic vs. non-sympathetic) of skin blood vessel constriction in response to localized skin cooling ("Degree and duration of cooling"), 2) determine whether a2C-adrenergic receptors mediate vasoconstriction in locally cooled skin ("a2 Receptors"), and 3) investigate how human aging affects the vasoconstriction response in cooled skin. We hypothesize that vasoconstriction in cooled skin will be increasingly attenuated in older people as the degree and duration of cooling increases. We also hypothesize that the a2C-adrenergic receptors participate in the vasoconstriction response to local cooling, but the response is blunted in older people.