The Cardiovascular System

During the past two decades tremendous strides have been made in assessing the murine cardiovascular system as a result of the logarithmic increase in opportunities to use transgenic mice and embryonic stem cell and homologous recombination approaches. Gene mutations and targeted genes produce animals that have altered cardiovascular phenotypes. Hence, the need to accurately assess cardiovascular function is vitally important. This chapter considers the normal state of the cardiovascular system of mice as well as the changes measured when there is heart pathophysiology such as in myocardial hypertrophy and myocardial ischaemia and reperfusion. No attempt is made to describe the altered haemodynamic states of the hundreds of relevant transgenic/knockout mice used to study the heart and cardiovascular system; rather, select examples are cited for emphasis. The surgical techniques used to induce these altered states—restriction of aortic blood flow and occlusion of a coronary artery, respectively—are outlined. Several methods currently used to measure the mouse cardiovascular anatomy and function are described.