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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Feb 22.
Published in final edited form as: Nature. 2000 Sep 14;407(6801):233–241. doi: 10.1038/35025203

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Structure of a normal large artery. A large artery consists of three morphologically distinct layers. The intima, the innermost layer, is bounded by a monolayer of endothelial cells on the luminal side and a sheet of elastic fibres, the internal elastic lamina, on the peripheral side. The normal intima is a very thin region (size exaggerated in this figure) and consists of extracellular connective tissue matrix, primarily proteoglycans and collagen. The media, the middle layer, consists of SMCs. The adventitia, the outer layer, consists of connective tissues with interspersed fibroblasts and SMCs.