Cardiovascular System

Navigational overlay for the heart, blood vessels, and their resident cells. The cardiovascular system is among the most aging-burdened body systems: cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in older adults, and large-vessel stiffening is one of the most reproducible quantitative biomarkers of vascular age. This page links the atomic entity pages; the claims and citations live on those pages.

Tissues & organs

• heart — the muscular pump; age-related diastolic dysfunction, hypertrophy, and conduction changes
• myocardium — cardiac muscle wall; site of cardiomyocyte loss, fibrosis, and stiffening
• arteries — elastic and muscular conduit vessels; primary site of stiffening and atherosclerosis
• veins — capacitance vessels; valve degeneration drives chronic-venous-disease

Cell types

• cardiomyocytes — post-mitotic contractile cells; minimal renewal in adulthood
• cardiac-fibroblasts — drive cardiac-fibrosis and extracellular-matrix remodeling
• endothelial-cells — vascular lining; eNOS/NO decline and endothelial senescence are early events
• vsmc — vascular smooth muscle; osteogenic transdifferentiation drives vascular-calcification

Aging phenotypes

• cardiovascular-aging — the integrative system-level phenotype
• atherosclerosis — intimal plaque disease
• arterial-stiffening — the functional outcome of medial stiffening (pulse-wave velocity)
• heart-failure — terminal functional decline (HFpEF is the aging-typical form)
• cardiac-fibrosis — interstitial/perivascular collagen accumulation
• chronic-venous-disease — venous valve and wall failure
• familial-hypercholesterolemia — monogenic accelerator of atherosclerosis

Key processes & axes

• vascular-calcification — VSMC osteogenic switch; the bone-vascular axis
• The mineral-aging axis intersects here: hyperphosphatemia, klotho, fgf23, matrix-gla-protein, vitamin-k — phosphate/Klotho dysregulation drives medial calcification

Auto-aggregated tissue members

LIST FROM "tissues"
WHERE parent-system = "cardiovascular-system"
SORT file.name

Missing / planned pages

• [[capillaries]], [[pericardium]], [[cardiac-conduction-system]] — not yet seeded stub
• [[lymphatic-system]] — closely related; lymphatic/venous return overlap

See also

• by-organ-system — index of all body-system MOCs
• hallmarks-of-aging · sens-damage-categories — the two framework MOCs
• chronic-inflammation — “inflammaging” is a dominant cardiovascular aging driver