Types of Blood Vessels
Coronary artery disease: Atherosclerosis with narrowing of the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle. Coronary artery disease makes a heart attack more likely. Carotid artery disease: Atherosclerosis with narrowing of one or both of the carotid arteries in the neck. Disease of the carotid arteries makes stroke more likely.
Arteries transport blood away from the heart and branch into smaller vessels, forming arterioles. Arterioles distribute blood to capillary beds, the sites of exchange with the body tissues. Capillaries lead back to small vessels known as venules that flow into the larger veins and eventually back to the heart.
The smallest blood vessels in the human body are capillaries, which connect arteries and veins. Capillaries can be as small as 5 micrometers wide. The average adult body has about 10 billion capillaries.
Pathology Blood Vessels I Lecture Learn with flashcards, ... the space inside the blood vessel filled with central blood. ... Distributing arteries: ...
An elastic artery is also known as a conducting artery, because the large diameter of the lumen enables it to accept a large volume of blood from the heart and conduct it to smaller branches. Figure 3. Comparison of the walls of an elastic artery, a muscular artery, and an arteriole is shown. In terms of scale, the diameter of an arteriole is measured in micrometers compared to millimeters for elastic and muscular arteries.
Blood vessels function to transport blood.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.
This middle layer is much thinner in venules than it is in other blood vessels. The outer layer of the venule is composed of a tough, fibrous sheath of connective tissue that binds the entire structure together.