Abstract
The clinical implications of early and late endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) in coronary artery disease (CAD) remain unclear. We investigated endothelial dysfunction in CAD by simultaneously examining early and late EPC colony formation and gene expression of specific surface markers in EPCs. EPCs were extracted from a total of 83 subjects with (n = 47) and without (n = 36) CAD. Early and late EPC colonies were formed from mononuclear cells extracted from peripheral blood. We found that fewer early EPC colonies were produced in the CAD group (7.2 ± 3.l/well) than those in the control group (12.4 ± 1.4/well, p < 0.05), and more late EPC colonies were produced in the CAD group (0.8 ± 0.2/well) than those in the control group (0.25 ± 0.02/well, p < 0.05). In the CAD group, the relative expression of CD31 and KDR of early and late EPCs was lower than in the control group. These results demonstrate that CAD patients could have increased late EPC density and that early and late EPCs in CAD patients exhibited immature endothelial characteristics. We suggest that changes in EPC colony count and gene expression of endothelial markers may have relation with development of CAD.
Highlights
Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are of interest to medical researchers because of their role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic diseases such as coronary artery disease (CAD) [1, 2]
We demonstrate the following: (1) fewer early EPC colonies were produced in patients with CAD than in control subjects and higher late EPC colonies were found in patients with CAD ; (2) in early EPCs, levels of CD45 mRNA, which is a hematopoietic marker, were higher in CAD patients than in control subjects; (3) in late EPCs, the level of CD31 mRNA, which is an endothelial marker, was lower in CAD patients than in control subjects
We investigated the behavior of late EPC in addition to early EPC to find differences between early EPCs and late EPCs in CAD patients compared with control subjects, it is still not clear whether the origin of early and late EPCs was the same or not
Summary
Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are of interest to medical researchers because of their role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic diseases such as coronary artery disease (CAD) [1, 2]. Circulating EPCs are recruited to endothelial tissues suffering from hypoxia, and they attend to blood vessel formation and repair in affected tissues [5]. They can be identified by cellular morphology, including specific cell surface proteins, and by examining the expression of genes encoding surface markers [8,9,10]. International Journal of Vascular Medicine and, prevented from becoming mature and effective EPCs. we studied the characteristic features of early and late EPCs in the presence or absence of CAD by simultaneously examining colony formation in vitro and the gene expression of specific surface markers
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