• What is the cardiovascular system?
• Which are the cardiovascular system’s basic components?
  
• How does your blood get oxygen?
  
• Can the cardiovascular system get sick?
  
• Are the cardiovascular diseases present only in the adult age?
• What can I do to keep my cardiovascular system healthy?
  
• What does EVGN mean?
  
• How can the EVGN research programme help us to defeat the cardiovascular disease?
  
• What is the work of the EVGN scientists?
  
• Who are the EVGN scientists?

What is the cardiovascular system?

It is the name for one of the most important systems in your body. Made up of the heart, blood and blood vessels, your cardiovascular system acts as a real delivery system. Blood moving from the heart, delivers oxygen and nutrients to every part of the body. On the return trip, the blood picks up waste products so that your body can get rid of them.
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Which are the cardiovascular system’s basic components?

They are the heart, the blood vessels and the blood. Your heart contracts and relaxes continuously pumping the blood through its chambers to all parts of the body. Than the blood vessels have the aims to carry oxygenated blood from the heart to all the rest of your body and deoxygenated blood back to the heart. Finally the blood, made up of a liquid component and a solid portion, has the duties to transport oxygen throughout the body, protect yourself from infections and repair blood vessels from damage.
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How does your blood get oxygen?

The blood gets oxygen through the respiration. When you inhale, you breathe in air rich in oxygen and send it down to your lungs. Here the oxygen poor blood, pumped from the heart, gets mixed with the air you have just breathe in. This oxygen-rich blood then travels back to the heart where it is pumped out through arteries and capillaries to the whole body. Veins carry the oxygen-depleted blood back to the heart for another ride
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Can the cardiovascular system get sick?

As other part of your body, the cardiovascular system may be affected by specific illnesses. Heart and circulatory disease, known also as cardiovascular disease (CVD), includes all problems of the heart and blood vessels. The two main diseases in this category are coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke, but CVD also includes congenital heart disease (i.e. the heart deformities present at birth), valvular heart disease and a range of other dysfunction of the heart and blood vessels.
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Are the cardiovascular diseases present only in the adult age?

The majority of the most well known cardiovascular problems are likely to arise once you get adult. Anyway others can be present since birth. This kind of illnesses are often congenital and depends from abnormalities in the genetic set or alteration during the baby development inside the uterus. Usually there is very little you can do to prevent this diseases and their treatment requires surgery. Differently the risk to get other cardiovascular problems later during the lifetime can be easily reduced by adopting an healthy lifestyle and a good diet.
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What can I do to keep my cardiovascular system healthy?

You can do a lot to help your heart and circulatory system to work properly. Some bad inhabits, such as smoking, drinking, eating food rich in fat and poor in fibres, being overweight and lazy to move, increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Adopt an healthy lifestyle and get used to a diet rich in vegetables and fruits since now, do not smoke and exercise at least twice a week. In this way you can lower the probability to have heart problems later in your lifetime.
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What does EVGN mean?

EVGN stands for European Vascular Genomic Network. This is an initiative funded by the European Union to fight heart diseases. The EVGN strategy is to organize the leading European research groups and organizations in cardiovascular field in a network. The basic idea is that communicating between each other and sharing ideas, protocols and results can help scientists to get good results in identifying new diagnostic methods and developing new therapies to treat cardiovascular disease.
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How can the EVGN research programme help us to defeat the cardiovascular disease?

Even though in the last years there was an improvement in the prevention and treatments of CVD, in the developed countries this result is at risk. This happens because of the large diffusion of bad inhabits such as smoking, drinking and overeating, and the ageing of population. It has been shown that cardiovascular diseases caused 51% of deaths in Europe in 2001. This is a big number and the only way to lower it is to understand in detail how the cardiovascular diseases begin and how they develop. Further advances in preventing and cure the CVD depend on inventing new strategies to prevent, diagnostic and treat this diseases.
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What is the work of the EVGN scientists?

The people who work with the European vascular genomic network, as all other scientist, do a very interesting and important job. They have to study a lot to learn what is already known about human circulatory system and CVD diseases. Then the researchers have to make hypothesis to figure out why a specific phenomenon happens (for example why sometimes fatty substances deposit in the blood vessels causing the vessel blockage). Then they have to carry out experiments to prove (or to refuse) their theories. Finally they have to communicate their results to the other scientists and to the general public. This is a very important part of scientist’s job: in this way everyone could perform the same experiment to test the theory.
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Who are the EVGN scientists?

All the people involved in the EVGN live and work in a European country. The network has in fact joined together 25 scientific institutions and 3 companies from 10 different European nations. The scientists are physicians, biologists, and lab technician that already have been working on cardiovascular problems since a lot of years. Among the researchers there are also a lot of students. All of them are post-graduated and they have to attend specific courses which give them the specific knowledge to work in this field.
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