How can angiogenesis cause health problems?

Researchers have found that abnormal blood vessels could cause problems for your health. Angiogenesis expert, William Li, MD, explains how abnormal angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels, can lead to blindness, cancer and more.

Transcript

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Researchers have found over the last 40 years, and I've been working in this field for more than half of that time, that abnormal blood

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vessels can cause terrible problems in terms of your health. For example, cancer is one of the diseases

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that we call angiogenesis dependent. And what that means is that when cancers form in our body,

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these are tiny little actually harmless cancer cells, abnormal cells, that are the result of mutations, or environmental carcinogens,

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or genetic problems, that they can't grow beyond more than the size of the head of a pencil or a pen,

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without new blood vessels bringing them oxygen. And in fact, we're forming cancers in our bodies all the time.

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And the difference between a harmless cancer that our immune system will wipe out and one that grows up to become a deadly cancer

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is the fact that when these cancers stimulate angiogenesis, or blood vessel growth, they suddenly have a fresh supply of oxygen and nutrients.

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So that's one example where angiogenesis can cause a health problem, but there are others. Abnormal angiogenesis is also found in the eye.

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The eye is crystal clear, like an aquarium. You can see right through it, and that's how light gets to our retinas, or the neural sensors that

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process images in our brain. And that crystal clarity that we have

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is dependent upon the lack of blood vessels in that space. When blood vessels grow abnormally,

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and it can occur in elderly people or people with diabetes and other conditions, those vessels can leak or bleed.

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And that situation destroys vision and causes blindness. Another situation would be where blood vessels are not

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growing adequately. This can actually happen in diabetes. For example, when there are inadequate blood vessels

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feeding our nerves and keeping the nerves in our feet alive, then we can easily step on a pebble,

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or have a grain of sand, or some other material in our shoe, and it can cause an injury that we won't even feel

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because the nerves are dead. We call that neuropathy. Problems with angiogenesis, not enough blood vessels, can actually kill nerves.

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And when your nerves die, and wounds occur, and we don't feel them, they can get infected. Those chronic wounds that don't have enough angiogenesis,

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or can't grow blood vessels for healing, can wind up causing gangrene and cause us to have our limbs, our legs, amputated.