Settle Down

Picture a rowdy bunch of young men and women crowding the pavement. They flit across the street and their number grows, blocking traffic with their immature antics. These are the smooth muscle cells, resulting from a gene mutation, that clog arteries and cause childhood-onset strokes similar to moyamoya disease. Researchers have found that these smooth muscle cells fail to fully mature, remaining developmentally flexible with a tendency to migrate beyond where they should be. Following injury to the carotid artery, mice with the mutation experience artery blockages (pictured, bottom left, with muscle in red combining with green inflammation markers to appear pink), neurological issues, and early death compared to normal mice (top). Treating the mutant mice with nicotinamide riboside, which alters cellular metabolism, boosted maturation of the immature cells and reduced their migration, restricting the impact of injury (right) and pointing to a new approach for treatment.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Anita Kaw and Suravi Majumder, and colleagues
• Division of Medical Genetics, Department of Internal Medicine, McGovern Medical School, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, July 2025