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Effects Of Hypertension And Aging On Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Contribution To Reconstituted Aortic Tissue Stiffness, Nancy Lisa Sehgel
Effects Of Hypertension And Aging On Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Contribution To Reconstituted Aortic Tissue Stiffness, Nancy Lisa Sehgel
Theses
Aortic stiffness increases with hypertension and aging, and much of this increase has been thought to occur due to changes in the extracellular matrix. However, an increase in cell stiffness could also be important. To study the cellular contribution to aortic stiffness, a reconstituted aortic tissue model (composed of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) in a collagen matrix) was developed. VSMCs isolated from thoracic aortic samples of 5-week and 18-week old male spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and normotensive Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats were passaged four times and then separately incubated in collagen for two days on a cylindrical mandrel. The resulting …