This Windkessel effect of the great elastic arteries has important biomechanical implications.

Elastic arteries include the largest arteries in the body, those closest to the heart.

The aorta is an elastic artery, and as such is quite distensible.

The distensibility of the large elastic arteries is therefore analogous to a capacitor.

As the carotid artery is an elastic artery, the muscular media is relatively small.

The pulmonary arteries, the aorta, and its branches together comprise the body's system of elastic arteries.

There are very few models using larger and elastic arteries like aorta for study of flow-induced response [ 19 ] .

The present study demonstrated that fluid shear stress induced regulation of TGF-β expression in the larger elastic artery.

Education and support for persons with Takayasu's arteritis (an inflammation of the large elastic arteries and aorta), their families and health professionals.

In contrast to the mechanism elastic arteries use to store energy generated by the heart's contraction, distributing arteries contain layers of smooth muscle.

Single unit smooth muscle, however, is most common and lines blood vessels (except large elastic arteries), the urinary tract, and the digestive tract.

A geyser of blood jetted over raw muscle and bare bone, but the elastic artery itself had snapped back into muscle and was nowhere in sight.

However, whether flow-induced arterial dilatation may also associated with apoptosis and how it might be coordinated with cell proliferation in a large elastic artery remain unclear.

Distributing arteries (or muscular arteries) are medium-sized arteries that draw blood from an elastic artery and branch into "resistance vessels" including small arteries and arterioles.

The walls of large elastic arteries (e.g. aorta, common carotid, subclavian, and pulmonary arteries and their larger branches) contain elastic fibers, formed of elastin.

The Windkessel effect becomes diminished with age as the elastic arteries become less compliant, termed hardening of the arteries or arteriosclerosis, probably secondary to fragmentation and loss of elastin.

As people age, "The Mayo Clinic Heart Book" explains, the smooth, elastic artery walls normally become thicker, and their calcium content increases, in effect hardening all arteries to some degree.

Since the rate of blood entering these elastic arteries exceeds that leaving them due to the peripheral resistance there is a net storage of blood during systole which discharges during diastole.

Windkessel effect is a term used in medicine to account for the shape of the arterial blood pressure waveform in terms of the interaction between the stroke volume and the compliance of the aorta and large elastic arteries (Windkessel vessels).

Most smooth muscle is of the single-unit variety, that is, either the whole muscle contracts or the whole muscle relaxes, but there is multiunit smooth muscle in the trachea, the large elastic arteries, and the iris of the eye.

In elastic arteries such as the aorta, which have very regular elastic laminae between layers of smooth muscle cells in their tunica media, the internal elastic lamina is approximately the same thickness as the other elastic laminae that are normally present.

Postductal coarctation is most likely the result of the extension of a muscular artery (ductus arteriosus) into an elastic artery (aorta) during fetal life, where the contraction and fibrosis of the ductus arteriosus upon birth subsequently narrows the aortic lumen.

An elastic artery (or large elastic artery or conducting artery) is an artery with a large number of collagen and elastin filaments in the tunica media, which gives it the ability to stretch in response to each pulse.