Origin of axial prestretch and residual stress in arteries

The structural protein elastin endows large arteries with unique biological functionality and mechanical integrity, hence its disorganization, fragmentation, or degradation can have important consequences on the progression and treatment of vascular diseases. There is, therefore, a need in arterial mechanics to move from materially uniform, phenomenological, constitutive relations for the wall to those that account for separate contributions of the primary structural constituents: elastin, fibrillar collagens, smooth muscle, and amorphous matrix. In this paper, we employ a recently proposed constrained mixture model of the arterial wall and show that prestretched elastin contributes significantly to both the retraction of arteries that is observed upon transection and the opening angle that follows the introduction of a radial cut in an unloaded segment. We also show that the transmural distributions of elastin and collagen, compressive stiffness of collagen, and smooth muscle tone play complementary roles. Axial prestresses and residual stresses in arteries contribute to the homeostatic state of stress in vivo as well as adaptations to perturbed loads, disease, or injury. Understanding better the development of and changes in wall stress due to individual extracellular matrix constituents thus promises to provide considerable clinically important insight into arterial health and disease.