Flow-mediated dilatation (FMD) has become a commonly applied approach for the assessment of vascular function and health in humans. Recent studies emphasize the importance of normalizing the magnitude of FMD to its apparent eliciting stimulus, the postdeflation arterial shear. However, the relationship between shear stress and the magnitude of FMD may differ between groups. The aim of this stud...

because of continuous changing of anatomy, function and metabolism of the human brain, age- related change is a major risk factor in most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases, including parkinsons and huntingtons disease. therefore, knowing patterns of age-related atrophy of brain tissue can identify causes and possible role of diseases in decreasing brain function with age. the aim of this stu...

We tested the hypothesis that aging is associated with an impaired contraction-induced rapid vasodilation in healthy adults. We reasoned that employing single contractions of a small muscle mass would allow us to isolate the local rapid vasodilatory responses independent of systemic hemodynamic and sympathetic neural influences on forearm hemodynamics. We measured forearm blood flow (Doppler ul...

To clarify the role of autonomic nervous functions in cardiovascular adaptation to microgravity, heart rate variability (HRV) and blood pressure variability (BPV) were evaluated during thermoneutral head-out water immersion (HOI) of eight healthy young subjects 23 to 31 yr of age. The very low-frequency (VLF; 0.00-0.04 Hz) component of BPV tended to increase during HOI, whereas the low-frequenc...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to compare the relative levels of activation of the gluteus medius (Gmed) and rectus femoris (RF) muscles during natural (N) sit-to-stand (STS) and STS with hip abduction (ABD) in young and elderly females. [Subjects] We recruited 15 healthy young females and 15 healthy elderly females. [Methods] The activities of the dominant lower extremity gluteus medi...

Across numerous model systems, aging skeletal muscle demonstrates an impaired regenerative response when exposed to the same stimulus as young muscle. To better understand the impact of aging in a human model, we compared changes to the skeletal muscle transcriptome induced by unaccustomed high-intensity resistance loading (RL) sufficient to cause moderate muscle damage in young (37 yr) vs. old...

The nature and extent of cognitive impairment was examined in 29 healthy elderly subjects (mean age 69.8 yr) with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) and 30 demographically similar nondiabetic community volunteers (mean age 68 yr). Measures of verbal learning, abstract reasoning, and complex psychomotor functioning were performed more poorly by diabetic than nondiabetic subjects. Co...

With aging, structural and functional changes occur in the myocardium without obvious impairment of systolic left ventricular (LV) function. Transmural differences in myocardial vulnerability for these changes may result in increase of transmural inhomogeneity in contractile myofiber function. Subendocardial fibrosis and impairment of subendocardial perfusion due to hypertension might change th...

The age-dependent alterations in β-adrenergically mediated thermogenesis were investigated in 11 young (mean ± SE age: 21.9 ± 0.5 yr) and 9 older (52.9 ± 2.1 yr) men during intravenous infusion of the nonselective β-agonist isoprenaline (Iso). The older men had higher basal plasma norepinephrine (327.7 ± 35.8 vs. 159.0 ± 18.2 pg/ml, P < 0.001) and epinephrine (75.1 ± 18.1 vs. 29.1 ± 5.3 pg/ml, ...

The augmentation index and central blood pressure increase with normal aging. Recently, cyclooxygenase (COX) inhibitors, commonly used for the treatment of pain, have been associated with transient increases in the risk of cardiovascular events. We examined the effects of the COX inhibitor indomethacin (Indo) on central arterial hemodynamics and wave reflection characteristics in young and old ...