For poets, the heart symbolizes emotion, for soldiers, courage, and for lovers, romance. But for physiologists, the heart is simply a pump. Its job is to pump oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood to all your body’s tissues; your arteries provide the delivery system that makes it possible.
Doctors used to think of arteries as passive conduits for blood, working for your body the way a garden hose works for your lawn. Wrong! In fact, arteries are complex structures with crucial regulatory functions, and they are in the front line of the battle for cardiovascular health.
Every artery has three layers in its wall. New research has focused on the inner layer, which is composed of a thin layer of endothelial cells that are in direct contact with the bloodstream. Endothelial cells have a crucial role in vascular health, and exercise training has an important effect on them. Among other things, endothelial cells produce nitric oxide, which has two crucial functions. It keeps the arterial lining smooth and slippery, preventing damaging inflammation and artery-blocking blood clots. In addition, it relaxes the smooth muscle cells of the artery wall’s middle layer, preventing spasms and keeping arteries open.
Even in health, age takes a toll on endothelial cells, reducing nitric oxide production so that arteries become stickier, stiffer, and narrower. Exercise training boosts nitric oxide production, keeping arteries supple and young. And here’s more good news: you don’t have to start young or push yourself hard to get these benefits. For example, when scientists from the University of Colorado studied healthy but sedentary men with an average age of fifty-three, they found that a walking program produced dramatic gains in endothelial function in just three months.
More than three hundred years ago, the great English physician Thomas Sydenham observed, “A man is as old as his arteries.” Exercise will help keep you and your arteries young. It will also keep your arteries healthy. The inner and middle layers of the artery wall are the battlegrounds of atherosclerosis, the disease responsible for heart attacks, most strokes, and many cases of kidney failure and for peripheral artery disease, which can lead to gangrene and amputations, usually in the legs and feet. As you’ll soon see, exercise fights atherosclerosis, protecting you from heart attacks and strokes.
Doctors used to think of arteries as passive conduits for blood, working for your body the way a garden hose works for your lawn. Wrong! In fact, arteries are complex structures with crucial regulatory functions, and they are in the front line of the battle for cardiovascular health.
Every artery has three layers in its wall. New research has focused on the inner layer, which is composed of a thin layer of endothelial cells that are in direct contact with the bloodstream. Endothelial cells have a crucial role in vascular health, and exercise training has an important effect on them. Among other things, endothelial cells produce nitric oxide, which has two crucial functions. It keeps the arterial lining smooth and slippery, preventing damaging inflammation and artery-blocking blood clots. In addition, it relaxes the smooth muscle cells of the artery wall’s middle layer, preventing spasms and keeping arteries open.
Even in health, age takes a toll on endothelial cells, reducing nitric oxide production so that arteries become stickier, stiffer, and narrower. Exercise training boosts nitric oxide production, keeping arteries supple and young. And here’s more good news: you don’t have to start young or push yourself hard to get these benefits. For example, when scientists from the University of Colorado studied healthy but sedentary men with an average age of fifty-three, they found that a walking program produced dramatic gains in endothelial function in just three months.
More than three hundred years ago, the great English physician Thomas Sydenham observed, “A man is as old as his arteries.” Exercise will help keep you and your arteries young. It will also keep your arteries healthy. The inner and middle layers of the artery wall are the battlegrounds of atherosclerosis, the disease responsible for heart attacks, most strokes, and many cases of kidney failure and for peripheral artery disease, which can lead to gangrene and amputations, usually in the legs and feet. As you’ll soon see, exercise fights atherosclerosis, protecting you from heart attacks and strokes.
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