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，以确保它们获得足够的氧气和能量来让你继续前进。 我们的血管在运输血液到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，我们可以显著改变通过许多血管的血流。 血管不仅仅是运输血液的静态管道。 在短短几次心跳中，我们的动脉（将血液从我们的心脏转移出去的血管）可以增加它们的尺寸和硬度，我们知道这些因素会影响我们移动肌肉的能力。 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，它们可以扩张多少。 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，一次运动既可以暂时限制某些动脉的扩张，也可以增强扩张。 运动的效果似乎取决于我们休息时动脉的功能。我们有兴趣跟进我们的一些初步研究运动训练和单次锻炼会议与一些研究，以确定控制我们所观察到的变化的确切因素。我们还希望使用一些新的、令人兴奋的超声方法来直接观察动脉壁和肌肉内的血流。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。我们继续的研究将集中在使用尖端的超声技术来查看血管。 从这些研究中获得的信息将有助于推进目前关于如何控制血管硬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.******