First steps towards modeling the interaction of cardiovascular agents and smooth muscle activation in arterial walls

Abstract

Numerical simulation of the response of healthy and pathological arteries to cardiovascular agents can provide valuable information to the physician in the treatment of diseases such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, and the Marfan syndrome. Here, we provide a first step towards a computational framework to model the effects of antihypertensive agents on the mechanical response of arterial walls. A material model is developed by extending an existing formulation for wall tissue to incorporate the effects of calcium‐ion channel blockers. The resulting coupled deformation‐diffusion problem is then solved using the finite element method. Simulation results with drug activity show that, indeed, an increased lumen diameter due to reduced contraction is obtained. Additionally, a decrease in the rate of arterial contraction is observed, which is also consistent with expected behavior. Finally, we compare results for an implicit or explicit treatment of the the deformation‐diffusion coupling, and we observe that both coupling schemes yield comparable results for a wide range of time step sizes.

A computational framework for pharmaco‐mechanical interactions in arterial walls using parallel monolithic domain decomposition methods

“…Here, we adopt the active response model by Uhlmann and Balzani [63] and modify it to model the impact of dihydropyridine CCBs. In a previous work [45], we already investigated the effect of CCBs on the activity of MLCK, considering constant MLCP activity. CCBs work by blocking the voltage-gated calcium channels and thereby reducing the calcium influx into the cytosol.…”