Intimal tears and their relationship to long-term patency in the rat femoral artery

The prognostic importance of arterial intimal tears is not certain in the long term. We have developed a model to evaluate pure intimal damage in the absence of other soft tissue injury or arterial anastomoses to study the effect of isolated traumatic arterial intimal tears. Groups of ten rats each were examined at 1, 2, 4, 8, and 48 weeks and were shown to have no incidence of thrombosis of the femoral artery following traumatic intimal tears. Histologically, there was persistence of medial disorganization and smooth muscle hypertrophy up to 48 weeks. We feel that intimal lesions alone do not predispose a rat femoral artery to thrombosis but might do so in the presence of significant soft tissue injury or an arterial anastomosis.