Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in western societies and endothelial dysfunction is one of the earliest signs seen in the development of such conditions. Thedevelopment of prognostic tools to aid in the prediction of micro- and macrovascular diseasebased on assessment of vascular reactivity is therefore of paramount importance.

Transdermal iontophoresis offers a quick, non-invasive and relatively straightforward way todeliver vasoactive substances in order to provoke a vascular response in man. When combined with either laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) or tissue viability imaging (TiVi) for quantification of these responses the methodology offers a potentially powerful tool forvascular investigations. The technique has, however, not been established in clinical practice yet and is mostly used in experimental settings. The lack of consensus in what data analysistechnique to use, uncertainty concerning the actual drug dose applied, and the difficulties associated with the assessment of responses to vasoconstrictors may have contributed to thisfact. The aim of this thesis is therefore to address these issues and thus facilitate the use and improve the applicability of transdermal iontophoresis for assessment of cutaneous microvascular function.

More specifically, a non-linear dose-response model (E_max-model) that is commonly used in in vitro investigations of vascular function was applied to the iontophoresis data. The resultsshow that the E_max-model accurately describes the cutaneous vascular responses totransdermally iontophoresed acetylcholine (ACh) and, sodium nitroprusside (SNP). The Emaxmodelgenerates variables that can be used for quantitative statistical analysis of data andenables a more powerful analysis compared to the methods presently used. It is furtherdemonstrated that the maximal dose effect and vascular responses vary between differentprotocols with the same total iontophoretic charge but with different current strengths anddurations. This finding implies that the assumption that the local drug dose is linearlyproportional to the iontophoretic charge (used for estimation of delivered drug dose to themicrovascular bed) may be inaccurate in in vivo investigations and that there is need for amore refined model.

It is also demonstrated that in a vasoconstrictive setting (iontophoresis of noradrenaline andphenylephrine) TiVi is the favourable technique for measuring vascular responses as it issensitive enough to generate data that can be fitted to the E_max-model even without predilatationof the vessels.