Regulatory Mechanisms of Vascular Structure and Function

当你站起来开始走在走廊上时，你的身体正在向你的工作肌肉发送和接收许多信号，以确保它们得到足够的氧气和能量来维持你的运动。我们的血管在输送血液进出我们身体的所有组织中起着重要的作用，当我们增加或减少活动时，我们可以戏剧性地改变许多血管的血流量。血管不仅仅是用来输送血液的静态管道。在几次心跳中，我们的动脉（将血液从心脏输送出去的血管）的大小和硬度就会增加，我们知道这些因素会影响我们运动肌肉的能力。我们动脉的两个重要特征是它们有多灵活，以及当它们需要容纳更多的血液流动时，它们能扩张到什么程度。我们有技术来评估这两个特征，但我们对它们的调节知之甚少。在我的实验室里，我们一直在研究活动，作为一种改变动脉压力和流量的技术，在改变动脉结构和功能方面所起的作用。例如，我们现在知道，一次锻炼既可以暂时限制某些动脉的扩张，也可以增强它们的扩张。运动的效果似乎取决于我们休息时动脉的功能。我们感兴趣的是跟进我们对运动训练和单次运动的一些初步研究，以确定控制我们所观察到的变化的确切因素。我们还想使用一些新的令人兴奋的超声波方法来直接观察动脉壁和肌肉内的血液流动。为了做到这一点，我们设计了一些研究来增加和减少动脉中的血流量，并观察反应和控制因素。我们的后续研究将集中于使用尖端超声技术来观察血管。从这些研究中获得的信息将有助于推进当前关于如何控制血管刚度和大小的基本知识。

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.