Regulatory mechanisms of arterial compliance and blood flow in humans

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Most of us realize that our heart and blood vessels play an important role in transporting blood to and from all of the tissues of our body.  Blood vessels are much more than static tubes for transporting blood.  A challenge to the human cardiovascular system, because we stand upright, is to continually adapt to the differing requirements for blood flow by the body's tissues. These flow changes are mostly dictated by changes in the energy demands of tissues; for example, skeletal muscle can changing its demand for energy as much as 100-fold within seconds of the onset of exercise and thus requires a drastic and almost instant increase in blood flow to support the increased energy consumption. The structure and function of our blood vessels can adapt to challenges they are presented with and can change significantly in both health and disease.  Two important features of our arteries (blood vessels which transport blood away from the heart) are how flexible (stiffness) they are and how much they can expand (dilate) when faced with the challenges of increasing flow.  We know that these two features, stiffness and dilation, change with disease processes, aging and some exercise programs but we know very little about what regulates these changes, particular in humans.  In my laboratory we have been studying the role that exercise, which stimulates large pressure and flow challenges to the arteries, plays in changing arterial structure and function.  We are also interested in examining the impact of any changes on the transport of blood to skeletal muscle tissue. We integrate the responses of a variety of components of the cardiovascular system to exercise challenges in order to determine control mechanisms. Our continuing studies will focus on the use of new ultrasound technology to examine blood vessel stiffness and changes in blood flow at the microscopic level.  The insight gained from these studies will assist in advancing the current basic knowledge of the cardiovascular system and will have applications in healthy and diseased states.