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MCAT
Course: MCAT > Unit 7
Lesson 7: Circulatory system- Circulatory system questions
- Meet the heart!
- Parts of the heart
- Flow through the heart
- Two circulations in the body
- Lub dub
- Layers of a blood vessel
- Arteries vs. veins - what's the difference?
- Resistance in a tube
- Putting it all together: Pressure, flow, and resistance
- Thermoregulation in the circulatory system
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Thermoregulation in the circulatory system
Created by Patrick van Nieuwenhuizen.
Want to join the conversation?
- What's the opposite of vasodilation?(35 votes)
- Vasoconstriction is the reduction in diameter of blood vessels.(74 votes)
- Capillaries do not have vascular smooth muscle, don't they? so they cannot constrict and dilate capillaries.
My professor said they do not have. Is there an error in this videos?(29 votes)- Capillary endothelium themselves are composed of a single layer of simple squamous epithelial cells, which are flat and allow easy diffusion and entry of substances. Within a capillary bed however, each capillary branch (branching from thoroughfare channel) has smooth muscle called "precapillary sphincters." These sphincters can contract at given periods to allow adequate perfusion of all other tissues within the body. Perhaps google images might provide some additional clarity.(11 votes)
- @"We'll draw your skin...in pink, because skin is pink..." 1:00
All skin isn't pink. I think this is a popular misconception.(18 votes) - I have long had a question about thermoregulation: In an environment that is itself warmer than 98.6°F, sweating will of course still help to cool the body, but vasodilation will in fact make the problem worse, as the blood will bring heat from the outside into the body, right?
But it is not impossible to be exposed to such an environment even under natural conditions, so does the body react to this for example by not dilating?
What is the highest outside temperature, that the body could stand for a longer time (without exercise)? Thank you!(5 votes)- You mentioned the exact mechanism that allows the body to cool: sweating. The effect of evaporation cooling is actually very potent. Sweating cools your skin dramatically, which allows the blood to send heat out to the skin, and then the skin gets cooled again by the sweat.(4 votes)
- The hypothalamus controlles vasodilation and vasoconstriction, correct?(4 votes)
- There are a lot of things that help control vasodilation and vasoconstriction and the hypothalamus is one of them.(6 votes)
- How different are cold blood animals in term of thermoregulation? What are they lacking? How do they survive?(2 votes)
- Cold blooded animals are different in the fact that they cannot control their body heat at all.
Cold blooded animals lack the internal mechanisms that regulate heat, instead, they rely on heat from other things (especially the sun), which is why lizards are often seen sunning themselves, to raise the temperature of the bodies,
hope this helps.(6 votes)
- is this the reason that you can get frostbitten?(3 votes)
- Technically, yes. Frostbite is an "injury to body tissues caused by exposure to extreme cold, typically affecting the nose, fingers, or toes and sometimes resulting in gangrene." Its when ice crystals form inside of a person.(4 votes)
- Is there any name given to the 'smooth muscles'?(2 votes)
- Yes, like skeletal muscle it depends where they are in the body. I see you are reading about thermoregulation. Goosebumps or hair that stands up when you are cold or scared is thanks to the arrector pili smooth muscles. Enjoy! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrector_pili_muscle(5 votes)
- AtPatrick says it's 70 degrees outside. Fahrenheit or Celsius. 0:09(2 votes)
- Probably Fahrenheit, 70C would be so extremely hot.(4 votes)
- why do we have to cover up in a blanket when we have a fever? wouldn't that make the fever worse?(3 votes)
- When you put a blanket while you have a INTERNAL fever, it will help you to sweat, so that the fever can be eliminated by the pores of the skin by the form of sweat. You should cover up with a wet blanket, so that you body can stimulate itself to sweat. Over the wet blanket you can put other dried blankets. You should drink warm or hot water, or tea so that you can keep stimulating your body to keep sweating. But REMEMBER: you should always keep the brain cold, because it's a sensitive organ and it can't be over warmed, or you can get worst. You can have even a seizure. You can also take a hot shower after that.
When you have a EXTERNAL or NORMAL fever, you shouldn't cover up yourself. You should take of your clothes. Because your body is already stimulated to sweat and cover up yourself can get your body to get even hotter, witch it can be very bad.(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Let's say this is you, and let's say it's a nice day outside. We've got a sun shining. Let's say it's about 70 degrees outside. And let's say you've been
doing a bunch of exercise. One thing that's gonna
happen when you do exercise is your body is gonna
produce a lot of heat. And the reason for that
is you have muscles, like this quadriceps in your leg and like your heart that
are gonna be very active when you're doing exercise. And all the reactions
that make them active end up releasing heat. And so a problem that your body
might face in this situation is how does it maintain
its core body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit? Now, one of the ways that
your body can get rid of this excess heat produced
by your muscles is to sweat. But there's another way
that it gets rid of heat that I'd like to talk about here. And that way also involves the skin. And so to find out more about it, let's look at a zoomed in picture if a little piece of your skin. So here we're gonna draw your skin in this zoomed in frame here. So here is the surface of your skin, which we'll draw in pink. The skin is pink. And below your skin a little bit deeper, you're gonna have some blood vessels. Let's say this is maybe an arteriole. Let's call it arteriole. And this arteriole will
be supplying your skin with blood and with oxygen via the blood. The way it's gonna do this is to send off little capillary beds into the skin, which I'll try to draw here. Here are our little capillary beds. And these capillary beds, of course, consist of very fine blood vessels with high surface area that
allow exchange of oxygen between the blood and the tissue. But what you have to realize
about the skin for our purposes is that it kind of acts as insulation. And the reason for this is that oftentimes it's not a nice day out. And oftentimes you're not doing exercise. So when it's a cold day out and you're maybe just sitting outside, you don't want to lose too much heat. And so in those cases it's
great to have this insulation that keeps the heat from down below and from this arteriole, for instance, that keeps that heat from
diffusing out too quickly. So it's really just like your house, which during winter you
want to have insulation to prevent loss of heat. But these little capillaries that go to the surface of the skin, as you can tell, they kind of
bypass all this insulation, and they go right to the surface. And so the heat from the blood
going to these capillaries will have a much easier
time of getting out. And this analogy to the house is that these little capillaries
are like little windows that allow heat out past the insulation in the walls of your house. So one thing you're gonna do when you're trying to get rid of heat, so now we're no longer
talking about winter, is, well, what would you do in your house, if it were really hot inside the house and you had these windows
that were just kind of, you know, not open too
wide, what you would do if you were feeling
really hot in your house is you'd open up those windows wider. So that is exactly what
your body is going to do when your body is overheating. So here we've got our skin again. And here we've got our arteriole running through the
deeper part of the skin. What your body's gonna do is it's gonna open up that window wider. And so it's going to dilate
these capillaries over here. It's gonna make them much
wider than they were. And this is known as vasodilation. Vasodilation. It'll vasodilate those capillaries because what's gonna happen when these capillaries are vasodilated? Do you think that more or less blood is going to be passing
through these capillaries in this situation or in this one? And obviously more is going to pass the capillaries in this situation. So here I'm just drawing in the insulation of our skin again. And now in this case we
have a lot more blood going up into these capillaries and therefore, a lot more loss of heat to these surroundings. And so this is what
happens when it's hot out and when your body
wants to get rid of heat so that it can maintain its
nice core temperature of 98.6. And by the way, something we should ask is what's so special about this 98.6? Why do we want that temperature? And the answer is that
your body has, as you know, tons of chemical reactions
occurring all of the time. And if you've taken some chemistry, you might have learned
that temperature affects the way that reactions are carried out, how fast they're carried out, where the equilibrium is, et cetera. And that might sound, you
know, fancy or confusing if you don't know much chemistry. But the point is that all the machinery and all the chemistry of your body works optimally at this temperature. And that's why you want to maintain it. Now, this is what happens
when it's hot out. And when it's cold out, what
do you think is gonna happen? Well, when it's cold out, you're gonna wanna close the windows. You're gonna wanna close these
windows that allow heat out. So you're gonna do the reverse. You're going to make your capillaries as small as possible. And so as a result you're gonna have less heat at the surface of your skin. And that's why if it's a cold day outside and you walk around,
when you feel your hands, they feel extremely cold. And that's because your body has made all the capillaries in your
skin as thin as possible so that you lose very little heat. And because they're thin,
this whole surface area of your skin becomes very cold. Now, as a kind of review, we
can also ask the question, maybe this has been bothering you for the whole video so far, but how does your body regulate
the size of these vessels? And the answer is that
all these blood vessels have little bits of
smooth muscle around them, which I'll just draw in orange, little smooth muscle cells around them. And these smooth muscle cells, when they contract, when they squeeze, they make the vessels smaller. And when they relax, they
allow the vessels to be bigger. And the way that your body
tells these smooth muscle cells to squeeze or not to squeeze
is just through nerves. So I'm gonna draw a nerve in purple. And it might be kind of hard to see, but I think you get the point. Your body literally sends
impulses through these nerves that tell these smooth muscle cells whether they should be contracting or whether they should be relaxing.