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The Greek physician Herophilus (born 335 BC) distinguished veins from arteries, noting the thicker walls of arteries, but thought that the pulse was a property of arteries themselves. Greek anatomist Erasistratus observed that arteries that were cut during life bleed. He ascribed the fact to the phenomenon that air escaping from an artery is ...
The tunica media may (especially in arteries) be rich in vascular smooth muscle, which controls the caliber of the vessel. Veins do not have the external elastic lamina, but only an internal one. The tunica media is thicker in the arteries rather than the veins. The outer layer is the tunica adventitia and the thickest layer in veins. It is ...
The middle coat is composed of a thick layer of connective tissue with elastic fibers, intermixed, in some veins, with a transverse layer of muscular tissue. [6] The white fibrous element is in considerable excess, and the elastic fibers are in much smaller proportion in the veins than in the arteries.
The converse argument is that generally artery walls are thicker and more muscular than veins as the blood passing through is of a higher pressure. This means that it would take longer for any oxygen to diffuse through to the cells in the tunica adventitia and the tunica media, causing them to need a more extensive vasa vasorum.
This is normally the thickest tunic in veins and may be thicker than the tunica media in some larger arteries. The outer layers of the tunica externa are not distinct but rather blend with the surrounding connective tissue outside the vessel, helping to hold the vessel in relative position. [3]
The tunica intima (Neo-Latin "inner coat"), or intima for short, is the innermost tunica (layer) of an artery or vein. It is made up of one layer of endothelial cells (and macrophages in areas of disturbed blood flow), [ 1 ] [ 2 ] and is supported by an internal elastic lamina .
Intima–media thickness (IMT), also called intimal medial thickness, is a measurement of the thickness of tunica intima and tunica media, the innermost two layers of the wall of an artery. The measurement is usually made by external ultrasound and occasionally by internal, invasive ultrasound catheters .
The externa, alternatively known as the tunica adventitia, is composed of collagen fibers and elastic tissue—with the largest arteries containing vasa vasorum, small blood vessels that supply the walls of large blood vessels. [3] Most of the layers have a clear boundary between them, however the tunica externa has a boundary that is ill-defined.