Fig. 1

Varicose veins show thickened intima, media and adventitia, as well as increased synthetic smooth muscle cells. a HE staining was performed to observe the morphological differences between human varicose veins and normal veins. Scale bar: 50 μm. i intima, m media, a adventitia. b–c Immunohistochemistry was used to observe the localization and expression of the contractile marker SM22α (b) and the synthetic marker OPN (c) in human varicose veins and normal veins. The mean optical density (OD) was measured using Image-Pro Plus 6.0 software. Scale bar: 25 μm. N = 10/group. Normal normal veins, VV varicose veins