Vascular homeostasis and the concept of mechanobiological stability

Vascular mechanics has been studied in depth since the early 1970s mainly following classical concepts from continuum mechanics. Yet, an important distinction of blood vessels, in contrast to typical engineering materials, is the continuous degradation and deposition of material in these living tissues. In this paper we examine mechanical consequences of such mass turnover. Motivated by Lyapunov's stability theory, we introduce the new concepts of mechanobiological equilibrium and stability and demonstrate that blood vessels can maintain their structure and function under physiological conditions only if new material is deposited at a certain prestress and the vessels are both mechanically and mechanobiologically stable. Moreover, we introduce the concept of mechanobiological adaptivity as a third corner stone to understand vascular behavior on a continuum level. We demonstrate that adaptivity represents a key difference between the stability of mechanobiological and typical human-made systems. Based on these ideas, we suggest a change of paradigm that can be illustrated by considering a common arterial pathology. We suggest that aneurysms can be interpreted as mechanobiological instabilities and that predictions of their rupture risk should not only consider the maximal diameter or wall stress, but also the mechanobiological stability. A mathematical analysis of the impact of the different model parameters on the so-called mechanobiological stability margin, a single scalar used to characterize mechanobiological stability, reveals that this stability increases with the characteristic time constant of mass turnover, material stiffness, and capacity for stress-dependent changes in mass production. As each of these parameters may be modified by appropriate drugs, the theory developed in this paper may guide both prognosis and the development of new therapies for arterial pathologies such as aneurysms.