Capillary pericytes regulate cerebral blood flow in health and disease
By C. Hall, C. Reynell, Bodil Gesslein, N. Hamilton, Anusha Mishra, B. Sutherland, F. O'Farrell, A. Buchan, M. Lauritzen, David Attwell. Nature, 2014
1,719 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Increases in brain blood flow, evoked by neuronal activity, power neural computation and form the basis of BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) functional imaging. Whether blood flow is controlled solely by arteriole smooth muscle, or also by capillary pericytes, is controversial. We demonstrate that neuronal activity and the neurotransmitter glutamate evoke the release of messengers that dilate capillaries by actively relaxing pericytes. Dilation is mediated by prostaglandin E2, but requires nitric oxide release to suppress vasoconstricting 20-HETE synthesis. In vivo, when sensory input increases blood flow, capillaries dilate before arterioles and are estimated to produce 84% of the blood flow increase. In pathology, ischaemia evokes capillary constriction by pericytes. We show that this is followed by pericyte death in rigor, which may irreversibly constrict capillaries and damage the blood–brain barrier. Thus, pericytes are major regulators of cerebral blood flow and initiators of functional imaging signals. Prevention of pericyte constriction and death may reduce the long-lasting blood flow decrease that damages neurons after stroke.
Subfields: Neurology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5607bc3b041b23c1dd47d11e21a6dd9c84bf1391
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In Neurology
Citations in the corpus
- A blood–brain barrier overview on structure, function, impairment, and biomarkers of integrity (2020, background): “These data are noteworthy from a clinical standpoint since the degeneration and injury of PCs have been reported in many neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) [46–49], mild dementia [50], amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) [34], and stroke [35].”
- Neuroinflammatory mechanisms of blood-brain barrier damage in ischemic stroke. (2019, result): “Consistent with this finding, a recent study found that pericyte loss or constriction results in cerebral blood flow increase and a subsequent BBB breakdown in stroke (75).”
- Regional blood flow in the normal and ischemic brain is controlled by arteriolar smooth muscle cell contractility and not by capillary pericytes (2015, neutral): “…in experimental approaches (Vates et al., 2010) and from the belief that pericytes express SMA in vivo (Yemisci et al., 2009) and that SMCs are not located on brain vessels other than zero-order penetrating arterioles (Hall et al., 2014), which leads to misidentification of SMCs as pericytes.”
- The blood–brain barrier in systemic infection and inflammation (2021, background): “The second is the regulation of capillary diameter and cerebral blood flow [62, 63].”
- Ischemia/Reperfusion (2016, neutral): “tions are mediated by endothelial ICAM-1 (32, 85, 438, 859), VCAM-1 (438) and P-selectin (32, 318, 859).”
- The blood-brain barrier. (2015, background): “These cells contain contractile proteins, and have the ability to contract to control the diameter of the capillary (Peppiatt et al. 2006; Hall et al. 2014).”
- Wound Healing: A Cellular Perspective. (2019, background): “” Pericytes surround endothelial cells in blood vessels and serve critical functions including destabilization and stabilization of microvasculature, regulation of blood flow, and creation of a vascular barrier to bacteria (10, 169, 384, 389).”