Regulatory Mechanisms of Vascular Structure and Function

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When you stand up and begin to walk down the hallway, your body is sending and receiving many signals to your working muscles to ensure that they are receiving enough oxygen and energy to keep you going. Our blood vessels play an important role in transporting blood to and from all of the tissues of our body and we can dramatically change the blood flow through many of our blood vessels when we increase or decrease our activity. Blood vessels are not just static tubes for transporting blood. In just a few heartbeats our arteries (the blood vessels that move blood away from our heart) can increase their size and stiffness and we know that these factors can influence our ability to move our muscles. Two important features of our arteries are how flexible they are and how much they can expand when they need to accommodate more blood flow. We have techniques to assess these two features but we know very little about their regulation. In my laboratory we have been studying the role that activity, as a technique to change pressure and flow in arteries, plays in altering arterial structure and function. We now know, for example, that a single exercise session can either temporarily limit the expansion of some arteries or enhance the expansion. It seems that the effects of exercise are dependent on how well an artery can function when we are at rest. We are interested in following up some of our initial studies on exercise training and single exercise sessions with some studies to determine the precise factors that control the changes we have observed. We also want use some new and exciting ultrasound methods to look directly at the walls of the arteries and blood flow inside muscles. To do this we have designed some studies to both increase and decrease blood flow in arteries and look at the responses and control factors. Our continuing studies will focus on the use of cutting edge ultrasound technology to view blood vessels. The information gained from these studies will assist in advancing the current basic knowledge of the how blood vessel stiffness and size is controlled.******