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Oxidative stress and disease: atherosclerosis

Published on July 30, 2026   27 min

A selection of talks on Cardiovascular & Metabolic

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0:00
Hello, everyone. My name is Arthur Almeida, and I'm currently enrolled at the Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular and Research Training Institute at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States. Today we will talk a little bit about oxidative stress and disease, specifically atherosclerosis.
0:26
The content of this lecture today: we will talk a little bit about reactive oxygen species, in the second phase we will talk about atherosclerosis, and we will finish this lecture talking about antioxidant therapies.
0:43
Before we begin, I would like to introduce some key concepts about the redox biology field, which is a redox reaction is a chemical reaction in which there is a transfer of electrons, could be oxidation with loss of electrons or a reduction that is a gain of electrons. As you can see, the NADH can be oxidized into NAD. In this reaction, there will be a release of two electrons. The reverse reaction the NAD can receive two electrons to become NADH. In our body, most of the reactions are redox reactions.
1:28
These reactions are very important because life depends on the flow of the electrons to capture and use this energy, and almost all bioenergetic reactions are redox reactions in its core. In aerobic cells, oxygen is the final electron receptor. Here you can see the molecule of oxygen in its ground state; it's very stable. However, if this molecule receives some kind of energy, it may change the electron configuration that maintains this molecule stable, and now the electrons can jump inside this configuration. It's the same molecule, but now the configuration of the electrons is different, which makes this molecule in the singlet form very reactive. It's the same molecule but with different chemical properties.

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