Japanese research shows that blue light can promote artificial blood vessel thickening

Business News Agency August 25th The National Research Center for Circulatory Diseases of Japan issued a communique, saying that researchers at the center discovered that when artificial blood vessels are created in animals, blood vessels tend to thicken if they are simultaneously irradiated with blue light.

The researchers used this method to successfully create artificial blood vessels and valves in the dog's body. This technique may be applied to the treatment of patients with severe heart disease with weakened blood vessels.

The team headed by the center's Medical Engineering Materials Research Center, headed by Yasuhide Tadao, buried a special cylinder made of acryl under the skin of the dog's back as a mold. A month later, protein was attached to the 16-mm-diameter cylinder to form blood vessels and valves. The researchers took the cylinder together with the blood vessels and valves, pulled the cylinder out, and then transplanted the blood vessels and valves back into the dog's body to confirm that the blood vessels and valves functioned properly.

Using this method, researchers could only make blood vessels 0.1 mm thick. Later, they tried to put a light-emitting diode in the cylinder and let the diode emit blue light in the first 3 days after the cylinder was buried. The results showed that blood vessels successfully thickened to 1 mm after one month.

The researchers confirmed that the irradiated blood vessels contained abundant elastin. This shows that there appears to be a mechanism in the animal body to produce elastin after being irradiated with light.