STARLING (1894, 1896) described the basic forces responsible for producing fluid shifts between the circulating blood and the surrounding tissue spaces. On page 324 of his classical article entitled "On the absorption of fluids from the connective tissue spaces," Starling described how capillary pressure determines transudation into the tissues and the osmotic pressure of the proteins determine...

STARLING (1894, 1896) described the basic forces responsible for producing fluid shifts between the circulating blood and the surrounding tissue spaces. On page 324 of his classical article entitled "On the absorption of fluids from the connective tissue spaces," Starling described how capillary pressure determines transudation into the tissues and the osmotic pressure of the proteins determine...

The small molecular weight peptide, atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), produces marked sodium and water excretion. The peptide, extracted from several species of vertebrate heart, also has been shown to increase glomerular filtration and reduce plasma volume. Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for the action of the peptide but remain undefined. In the present report, the ANP-induce...

In 1953 Frank Low published the first high-resolution electron micrographs of the human pulmonary blood-gas barrier. These showed that a structure only 0.3-μm thick separated the capillary blood from the alveolar gas, immediately suggesting that the barrier might be vulnerable to mechanical failure if the capillary pressure increased. However, it was 38 years before stress failure was recognize...

PURPOSE To evaluate the response of retinal capillary circulation to pregnancy in women with diabetes and to correlate microcirculatory changes with progression of retinopathy during pregnancy. METHODS A prospective follow-up study of 32 pregnant women with insulin-dependent diabetes and 11 nondiabetic pregnant women. Perimacular capillary blood flow measured noninvasively by retinal flowmetr...

The bronchial circulation undergoes angiogenesis in several pathological conditions, such as lung neoplasm and bronchiectasis, but whether the pulmonary circulation can do this has been questioned. A woman treated with mitomycin C and 5-fluorouracil developed progressive, fatal pulmonary hypertension over 5 months. In addition to light and transmission electron microscopic examination of her lu...

BACKGROUND The hemodynamic definitions of pulmonary hypertension (PH) in left heart disease have recently been refined to better match the characteristics required to reflect the presence of pulmonary vascular disease. Accordingly, we tested the hypothesis that abnormalities in the stiffness of pulmonary circulation would persist after heart transplantation in patients with combined post-capill...

Oxygen is an essential part of the living organism. It is transported from blood to the body tissue by the systematic circulation and large part of it is stored in the blood flowing in capillaries. In this work we discuss a mathematical model for oxygen transport in tissues. The governing equations are established assuming that the blood is flowing along a co-axial cylindrical capillary inside ...

The trypsin digestion technique has revealed a preferential loss of endothelial cells (in conditions other than diabetes) and eventually a total acellularity of many retinal capillaries. The surprise is that this may occur toithout recognized functional abnormality or without appreciable histologic change in the rest of the retina. Perhaps the retina has a large reserve capacity normally or per...

Transposition of the great arteries is frequently complicated by the early onset of pulmonary vascular disease. It is difficult to measure pulmonary blood flow by the Fick principle because the pulmonary arteriovenous oxygen content difference is small and bronchial blood flow is increased in this condition. In eight patients (mean age 7.7 years, range 3 months to 29 years) with transposition o...