New aspects of artery resistance and structure

This issue contains a series of papers by the speakers at a Physiological Society sponsored symposium that took place during the meeting of the Spanish Physiological Society in Seville on February 13th 2005. The theme of the symposium was the need to consider the interaction between different components of the vascular wall in maintaining the structure of a blood vessel. The four speakers tackled topics ranging across the different cell types, their interactions and the signalling cascades involved. Rhian Touyz (Montreal) sets the scene with a presentation of the Intracellular mechanisms involved in vascular remodelling of resistance arteries in hypertension: the role of angiotensin II (Touyz, 2005). She reviews the signalling pathways in arterial smooth muscle cells and describes her laboratory's work in elucidating angiotensin II-mediated signalling, pointing out that we still know little about the specific molecules that underlie aberrant signalling in hypertension or at what level some cascades become more important than others. Ana Fortuño (Pamplona) addresses Oxidative stress and vascular remodelling (Fortuño et al. 2005), focusing on the pathophysiology of vascular diseases and how increased production of reactive oxygen species contributes to oxidative stress and is implicated in pathological processes, including endothelial dysfunction, activation of matrix metalloproteinases and smooth muscle cell migration, growth and apoptosis. She discusses NADPH oxidase as the most important source of superoxide anion in phagocytic and vascular cells. Silvia Arribas (Madrid) emphasises the importance of extracellular structures in maintaining arterial function, particularly Influence of elastin on rat small artery mechanical properties (González et al. 2005). She reviews how elastin gene defects and knock-out mice have highlighted the importance of elastin in vascular morphogenesis and hypothesises that it might also be critical in the vascular remodelling in diseases related to haemodynamic stress. She describes studies in the spontaneously hypertensive rat, in which elastin has a quite different organization from elastin in normotensive control animals, having an internal elastic lamina with smaller fenestrae, and she considers how early alterations in elastin might be key events in the inward remodelling in hypertension. The series is rounded off by Ian McGrath (Glasgow), who summarises New aspects of vascular remodelling: the involvement of all vascular cell types (McGrath et al. 2005), emphasising the roles of adventitia and endothelium as key players in vascular growth and repair, and painting a picture of blood vessels as in a constant state of self-maintenance. He also considers how new locations of receptors for vasoactive hormones shown by confocal microscopy and fluorescent ligands suggest new concepts in the on-going regulation of vascular structure.

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