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Improving
Cardiovascular Health
Exercise can
help fight vascular disease, leads to better quality of life
By Christian Basi
For decades, researchers across the country have studied the
beneficial effects of exercise. Now, two researchers at the
University of Missouri-Columbia have found that small amounts
of exercise can be beneficial, especially if there are obstructions
in a person’s vascular system.
Ronald Terjung and Steve Yang, biomedical-sciences
researchers in the MU College
of Veterinary Medicine, are studying animals with reduced
blood flow to the legs to understand how exercise may benefit
human patients with a similar condition. This condition, called
intermittent claudication, causes pain, usually in the calf
muscles, after climbing stairs or walking distances when more
flow is needed but cannot be delivered.
There are two primary reasons why being
physically active improves exercise tolerance in this condition,
Terjung said. First, being more physically active increases
the number of capillaries that bathe each muscle fiber with
blood in order to deliver oxygen. Thus, the active muscles can
better extract the oxygen that is delivered to them, even when
there is a limited amount of blood flow due to intermittent
claudication. The increase of the small vessels allows blood
to get through the obstruction and reach the calf muscles.
“The second and potentially more significant
vascular improvement that can be induced by even low intensity
walking is an increase in blood flow to the leg,” Terjung
said. “This occurs through delivery of blood through alternate
vessels that bypass the obstruction. These collateral vessels
can increase blood flow to the calf muscles during activity.”
Terjung and Yang found that the greater
blood flow comes through an enlargement of the vessels that
circumvent the obstruction. Exercise or light physical activity
increases human growth factors that are needed to stimulate
and coordinate vascular remodeling. This improvement and growth
can be beneficial in the event of intermittent claudication.
“Through our research, we were able
to demonstrate a close link between greater blood flow, increased
collateral vessels, and an improved exercise tolerance,”
Terjung said. “We are currently evaluating the mechanisms
that occur to produce this enlargement of these collateral blood
vessels.”
The research has been funded by more than
$4 million from the National
Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a division of the National
Institutes of Health, and more than $1 million from private
companies such as Sios, Collateral Therapeutics, Chiron, P&G
Pharmaceuticals and MicroHeart. The MU team's research has been
published in Circulation
Research and the American
Journal of Physiology.
“We hope that by better understanding
the processes of how vascular remodeling occurs through our
experiments, the more we will be able to appreciate how enhanced
activity is so beneficial to patients with intermittent claudication,”
Terjung said. “We hope this will lead to a better means
of helping these patients.”
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Last Update:
February 15, 2008
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