Arterial hypertension is a chronic medical condition associated with an elevated blood pressure. Chronic arterial hypertension initiates a series of events, which are known to collectively initiate arterial wall thickening. However, the correlation between macrostructural mechanical loading, microstructural cellular changes, and macrostructural adaptation remains unclear. Here, we present a microstructurally motivated computational model for chronic arterial hypertension through smooth muscle cell growth. To model growth, we adopt a classical concept based on the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient into an elastic part and a growth part. Motivated by clinical observations, we assume that the driving force for growth is the stretch sensed by the smooth muscle cells. We embed our model into a finite element framework, where growth is stored locally as an internal variable. First, to demonstrate the features of our model, we investigate the effects of hypertensive growth in a real human carotid artery. Our results agree nicely with experimental data reported in the literature both qualitatively and quantitatively.

中文翻译：

---

人颈动脉高血压生长的计算模型

动脉高血压是一种与血压升高有关的慢性疾病。慢性动脉高血压引发一系列事件，已知这些事件共同引发动脉壁增厚。然而，宏观结构机械载荷、微观结构细胞变化和宏观结构适应之间的相关性仍不清楚。在这里，我们通过平滑肌细胞生长提出了慢性动脉高血压的微观结构驱动计算模型。为了模拟增长，我们采用基于将变形梯度乘法分解为弹性部分和增长部分的经典概念。受临床观察的启发，我们假设生长的驱动力是平滑肌细胞感知的拉伸。我们将我们的模型嵌入到一个有限元框架中，其中增长作为内部变量存储在本地。首先，为了展示我们模型的特征，我们研究了高血压生长对真实人类颈动脉的影响。我们的结果与文献中报道的实验数据在定性和定量上都非常吻合。