August Krogh's theory of muscle microvascular control and oxygen delivery: a paradigm shift based on new data.

August Krogh's theory of muscle microvascular control and oxygen delivery: a paradigm shift based on new data. J Physiol. 2020 Sep 12;: Authors: Poole DC, Pittman RN, Musch TI, Østergaard L Abstract August Krogh twice won the prestigious international Steegen Prize, for nitrogen metabolism (1906) and overturning the concept of active transport of gases across the pulmonary epithelium (1910). Despite this, at the beginning of 1920, the consummate experimentalist was relatively unknown worldwide and even among his own University of Copenhagen faculty. But, in early 1919, he had submitted three papers to Dr Langley, then editor of The Journal of Physiology in England. These papers coalesced anatomical observations of skeletal muscle capillary numbers with O2 diffusion theory to propose a novel active role for capillaries that explained the prodigious increase in blood-muscle O2 flux from rest to exercise. Despite his own appraisal of the first two papers as "rather dull" to his friend, the eminent Cambridge respiratory physiologist, Joseph Barcroft, Krogh believed that the third one, dealing with O2 supply and capillary regulation, was"interesting". These papers, which won Krogh an unopposed Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1920, form the foundation for this review. They single-handedly transformed the role of capillaries from passive conduit and exchange vessels, functioning at the mercy of their upstream arterioles, into ind...
Source: The Journal of Physiology - Category: Physiology Authors: Tags: J Physiol Source Type: research