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Blood vessels function to transport blood to an animal's body tissues. In general, arteries and arterioles transport oxygenated blood from the lungs to the body and its organs, and veins and venules transport deoxygenated blood from the body to the lungs. Blood vessels also circulate blood throughout the circulatory system.
Blood flow in the pulmonary and systemic circulations showing capillary networks in the torso sections. The circulatory system includes the heart, blood vessels, and blood. [2] The cardiovascular system in all vertebrates, consists of the heart and blood vessels.
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.
Galen contradicted Erasistratus before him by proposing that arteries carried both air and blood, rather than air alone (which was essentially correct, leaving aside that blood vessels carry constituents of air and not air itself). [19] He proposed that the liver was the originating point of all blood vessels.
A capillary is a small blood vessel, from 5 to 10 micrometres in diameter, and is part of the microcirculation system. Capillaries are microvessels and the smallest blood vessels in the body. They are composed of only the tunica intima (the innermost layer of an artery or vein), consisting of a thin wall of simple squamous endothelial cells. [2]
Coronary circulation is the circulation of blood in the arteries and veins that supply the heart muscle (myocardium). Coronary arteries supply oxygenated blood to the heart muscle. Cardiac veins then drain away the blood after it has been deoxygenated.
A pulmonary artery is an artery in the pulmonary circulation that carries deoxygenated blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs.The largest pulmonary artery is the main pulmonary artery or pulmonary trunk from the heart, and the smallest ones are the arterioles, which lead to the capillaries that surround the pulmonary alveoli.
As part of the pulmonary circulation they carry oxygenated blood back to the heart, as opposed to the veins of the systemic circulation which carry deoxygenated blood. [citation needed] By definition, a vein is a blood vessel that carries blood to the heart, whether oxygenated or deoxygenated.