REVIEW article
Front. Endocrinol.
Sec. Cardiovascular Endocrinology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2025.1589160
This article is part of the Research TopicMetabolic Pathways to Multiple Long-term Conditions (Multimorbidity): Focusing on Cardio-metabolic Multimorbidity (CMM)View all 11 articles
Regulation of Osteogenic Differentiation in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells under High-Glucose Condition
Provisionally accepted
Jingjing Guo
Laijing Du*- The First Affiliated Hospital, and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China
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Diabetic patients have a higher tendency for vascular calcification (VC). This indicates a possible link between abnormal glucose metabolism and the development of VC.High glucose levels are a major cause of vascular calcification in diabetic patients.Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) are important functional units of the arterial media and show heterogeneity. Sustained hyperglycemia drives VSMCs to undergo a phenotypic transition from contractile state to osteo-/chondrogenic lineages through multiple pathophysiological mechanisms. Specifically, hyperglycemia stimulates metabolic reprogramming. This includes enhancing advanced glycation end products (AGEs), activating the diacylglycerol-dependent protein kinase C (PKC) pathway, disrupting the pentose phosphate flux (PPP), and dysregulating the hexosamine biosynthesis pathway (HBP). These changes trigger vesicles-mediated mineralization (including matrix/extracellular vesicles), oxidative stress, inflammatory cascades, and an imbalance between autophagy and apoptosis. This review systematically describes the metabolic remodelling induced by high glucose and its regulatory mechanisms in vascular calcification.
Keywords: Atherosclerosis, calcification, Osteogenic transformation, vascular smooth muscle cells, hyperglycemia Research Insights
Received: 07 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guo and Du. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Laijing Du, The First Affiliated Hospital, and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China
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