Cellular-scale transport in deformed skeletal muscle following spinal cord injury

Deep tissue injury (DTI) is a severe pressure ulcer initiating in weight-bearing skeletal muscles. Being common in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients, DTI is associated with mechanical cell damage and ischaemia. Muscle microanatomy in SCI patients is characterised by reduced myofibre sizes and smaller, fewer capillaries. We hypothesise that these changes influence mass transport in SCI muscles, making DTI more probable. Using multiphysics models of microscopic cross-sections through normal and SCI muscles, we studied effects of the following factors on transport of glucose and myoglobin (potential biomarker for early DTI detection): (i) abnormal SCI muscle microanatomy, (ii) large tissue deformations and (iii) ischaemia. We found that the build-up of concentrations of glucose and myoglobin is slower for SCI muscles, which could be explained by the pathological SCI microanatomy. These findings overall suggest that microanatomical changes in muscles post-SCI play an important role in the vulnerability of the SCI patients to DTI.