Nitric Oxide
“One of the most exciting new findings in cardiovascular medicine involves the molecule nitric oxide or NO. We now know that our bodies produce nitric oxide in the endothelium, a delicate tissue that is the inner lining of the blood vessel. The endothelium is so significant to blood vessel health that I predict that in the next few years the health of your endothelium will become as important as cholesterol to your doctor.”
The Cardiovascular Cure
John P. Cooke M.D., Ph. D.
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It helps maintain blood pressure by dilating blood vessels, helps kill foreign invaders in the immune response, is a mediator of penile erection, and is probably a major biochemical component of long-term memory… [these are] just a few of it benefits…
-The editors of the highly prestigious journal Science, after voting nitric oxide the 1992 molecule of the year.
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Excerpt from “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
By Bill Bryson Random House, 2003
“Surprises at the cellular level turn up all the time. In Nature, nitric oxide is a formidable toxin and a common component of air pollution. So scientist were naturally a little surprised when in the mid-1980s, they found it being produced in a curiously devoted manner in human cells. Its purpose was at first a mystery, but then scientists began to find it all over the place-controlling the flow of blood and energy levels of cells, attacking cancers and other pathogens, regulating the sense of smell, even assisting in penile erections. It also explained why nitroglycerine, the well known explosive, soothed the heart pain known as angina. (It is converted into nitric oxide in the blood stream, relaxing the muscle linings of vessels, allowing blood to flow more freely.) In barely the space of a decade this one gassy substance went from extraneous toxin to ubiquitous elixir”.
“I have been immersed in biological research for more than half a century, and in 1982, received the Nobel Prize for my discovery of a prostaglandin that was called prostacylin…..
Over the last 50 years biologists have discovered many different mediators or chemical messengers, which transmit signals from one cell to another……
Less than 15 years ago a different and very potent mediator of blood vessel relaxation and inhibition of platelet clumping was identified as Nitric Oxide (NO). It is the simplest messenger of them all……
There are special enzymes that generate NO from Arginine and we now know it has important functions in the brain, the immune system and vasculature…..”
Sir John Vane, D.Sc. F.R.S.
Nobel Laureate 1982
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“Arginine-derived nitric oxide, or ADNO, is a multi faceted molecular marvel, one made all the more amazing by the fact that researchers only recently discovered that it even exists inside human tissues.”
The Arginine Solution
Robert Fried, Ph., D. Woodson C. Merrell, M.D.