Angiogenesis in Skeletal and Cardiac Muscle

Abstract

The role that mechanical factors deriving from blood flow play in the growth of blood vessels was most probably mentioned for the first time by John Hunter in his “Treatise on the Blood Flow, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds,” published in 1794. Hunter was an anatomist who kept a deer herd in Richmond Park. He described enlargement of the carotid arteries in deer, coincident with the development of new antlers, which is known to involve intensive vascular growth. Almost a century later, Thoma (1) demonstrated that ontogenetic growth of vessels is caused by a combination of hemodynamic forces — increased blood flow, blood pressure, and wall tension — and mechanical stretch of vessels owing to the growth of the surrounding tissue. The importance of flow for capillary development was later shown in tadpole tails by Clark (2), who exposed to observation under the microscope the same site over many days, and in wound healing in the rabbit ear chamber (3). Today, the roles in angiogenesis of mechanical factors such as shear stress, circumferential stress, stretch, or physical forces owing to modification of the extracellular matrix are widely studied in tissue culture.