| Cardiovascular disease had been the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States since 1900. The therapies that are available to treat cardiovascular disease are end-stage. An example of an end-stage therapy is coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. However, it has been shown that vascular grafts undergo pathological calcification in a manner very similar to native artery calcification. Clinical therapy is not available to prevent or reverse vascular calcification; therefore, in order to design new therapies for vascular graft calcification we must first understand the mechanisms of native artery calcification. We are specifically interested in medial elastin-associated calcification. Circumstantial evidence exists for a correlation between elastin degradation, calcification, and osteogenesis. We used two animal models to investigate these correlations. The first model took advantage of using pure elastin which was implanted subdermally into juvenile male rats. The second model was a clinically relevant circulatory model where a single periadventitial treatment of rat abdominal aorta with calcium chloride was used to induce calcification. |
