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(Circulation. 2003;108:378.)
© 2003 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorials

Bone Marrow

A Fountain of Vascular Youth?

Peter Libby, MD

From the Donald W. Reynolds Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.

Correspondence to Peter Libby, MD, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 221 Longwood Ave, EBRC 307, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail plibby@rics.bwh.harvard.edu

Key Words: Editorials • endothelium • atherosclerosis • muscle, smooth • inflammation

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

It has been said that one is as old as one’s arteries. In view of the supreme importance of endothelium in arterial function, I should like to modify ... this statement by saying that one is as old as one’s endothelium.¹

— R. Altschul, 1954

Just a few years ago, the rules of blood vessel formation seemed simple. Endothelial cells emerged from the blood islands of the embryo to form primitive tubes, the precursors of the vasculature. Smooth muscle cells, recruited locally from various germ layers, invested the endothelial tubes, forming the sandwich structure of mature arteries and veins. Mechanical or metabolic injury supposedly stimulated smooth muscle cells, normally resident in the arterial tunica media, to migrate into the intima, proliferate, and form the lesions of the hyperplastic arterial diseases such as atherosclerosis, restenosis, in-stent stenosis, and transplantation arteriopathy.

See p 457

However, facts often fail to fit theory neatly, and emerging data paint a more complex picture of the formation, growth, and maintenance of blood vessels and the arterial response to injury. Considerable evidence suggests that vascular endothelial cells can not only arise postnatally from primitive precursors, but can originate also from the adult bone marrow or peripheral blood and take up residence on mature blood vessels.^2–4 Such endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) bear characteristic markers such as CD133, CD34, and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2.⁵

Smooth muscle cells in the artery may also derive from bone marrow precursors. Our laboratory stumbled on this finding in pursuit of the pathogenesis . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Related Article:

Aging, Progenitor Cell Exhaustion, and Atherosclerosis

Frederick M. Rauscher, Pascal J. Goldschmidt-Clermont, Bryce H. Davis, Tao Wang, David Gregg, Priya Ramaswami, Anne M. Pippen, Brian H. Annex, Chunming Dong, and Doris A. Taylor
Circulation 2003 108: 457-463. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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