Studies On Age-related Changes In Blood Vessel And Its Mechanisms

With advancing age, a series of changes take place in cardiovascular system, especially in the structure and function of the arteries. The thickness of arterial wall with ageing is induced by subintimal and media thickening ,and it closely relates to the hypertrophy and hyperplasia of vascular smooth muscle cells(VSMC). This is not only the important phenomenon of normal ageing in blood vessel, but also is the common pathological characteristic of some cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension and atherosclerosis. So age is thought to be an independent risk factor in the development of such diseases. At present, many animal experiments suggested that the proliferation of aortic smooth muscle cells(ASMC) increased obviously in vitro from old rats , and it had a certain intrinsic relationship to the development of some cardiovascular diseases . Because of its important role in the occurrence of cardiovascular diseases, we studied the relationship between the active proliferation of smooth muscle cells from old rats and changes in Ca²⁺ dynamics in this experiment.We firstly found that the impaired regulation of Ca²⁺ dynamics occurred in ASMC in vitro from old rats. It included the regulation of not only cytosolic Ca²⁺ but also nuclear Ca²⁺ . We only did a few preliminary research work on nuclear Ca²⁺ regulation due to the limitation of...