ABSTRACT
This chapter examines epidemiological, clinical, translational, and basic scientific evidence that supports resveratrol as a cardioprotective agent, reviewing selected key references. Although red wine itself has been well recognized to be cardioprotective, there are many molecules in red wine that can potentially be responsible for the effect. Resveratrol is one of the phytoalexins, plant molecules produced in response to a variety of noxious stimuli. In grapevines, resveratrol is synthesized in leaf tissue in response to various types of infections. The chapter reviews several animal studies that evaluated the protective roles of resveratrol in restenosis, platelet aggregation, and endothelial dysfunction. It discusses studies that demonstrated the beneficial roles of red wine in animal models of atherosclerosis. Z. Wang and others demonstrated that platelets from rabbits fed a high-cholesterol diet aggregated more readily than those fed a normal chow in vitro and that oral resveratrol treatment blocked the aggregation of platelets from high-cholesterol-fed rabbits.
