Introduction

Abstract

The title of this monograph indicates the range of investigations reported therein. Information emerging from fifteen-year morphological studies of vascular lesions associated with various diseases has led to the conclusion that vascular response to different kinds of injury is essentially uniform and that the morphology of the advanced lesions always resembles that of arteriosclerotic change. Various vascular diseases were analysed morphologically one by one, using experimental models which reproduced the conditions of the human disease, and conclusions were drawn from comparison of the models with one another and with human arteriosclerotic or other vascular lesions. Comparative evaluation of the findings favours that arteriosclerosis as such does not represent an independent morphological entity. The morphological characteristics of human and experimental vascular lesions resulting from different kinds of injury are usually so similar that the tissue changes in themselves are as a rule not conclusive as to the nature of the causative factor. The phenomena of vascular injury are essentially uniform, but they may be modified by the duration of the damage, the structure of the vessel wall and —least of all—by the nature of the injury.