Endothelium 1977: A Review

Abstract

This paper is conceived as a short update of the review published in 1965 (1). It is based on a set of 2,476 references assembled through a MEDLARS search limited to the single word endothelium (January 1966 – June 1977; a few references were added up to the end of 1977). Much to our regret, we were obliged to omit from our search the word capillary which would have yielded an unmanageable number of additional papers. About 5% of the MEDLARS titles referred to corneal endothelium and were eliminated. This decision, which was based on limitations of space, may well have discarded relevant data: vascular and corneal endothelium are both mesodermal structures, and although the corneal endothelium has some attributes which appear to be distinctive, such as a water pump (2), other properties are similar (3). In limiting the number of references to about 500, arbitrary choices had to be made; papers obviously belonging under the headings of inflammation, atherosclerosis, or thrombosis were not included and will be found in other portions of this volume. Some of the inevitable gaps will be filled by the bibliography of the papers quoted herein, by other reviews (4–15), and by the proceedings of the A. Benzon Symposium of 1969 (16).