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Modelling baroreceptors function

Cardiovascular diseases form one of the most dangerous events that affect human life. They are usually the result of high blood pressure. Thus controlling blood pressure within patient specific healthy limits is a goal that we must target. There are two control loops for blood haemostasis inside the body either long term or short term. Baroreceptors control the short term blood pressure regulation. They are nerve endings that exist in certain locations within the blood vessel walls and they report blood pressure into the brain and the central nervous system. However the basics of their function are not yet known. We propose here that the baroreceptors work by converting circumferential and axial pressure into a stress into their respective direction and they start to send nerve signals based on a threshold of strain energy of the location they are embedded in. Thus baroreceptors A fibre is highly likely to exist in the stiffer adventitia, while the media will contain C fibres. This explains the reason behind having identical fibres with different threshold. We were able to arrive to this solution by getting a relationship between stress–strain relationship for the whole wall and for the arterial vessels. These findings are quiet significant as they allow a method to identify different stress in the arterial wall layers using whole wall experimental data and also as they were able to differentiate between different fibres based on their locations inside the arterial wall. A complete modelling of the baroreceptors function might lead to the formation of biosynthetic material that could interact with the body on the cellular level, so as to give humans the mean to the control of short term blood regulation thus preventing hypertension and its accompanying diseases such as atherosclerosis.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:694814
Date January 2012
CreatorsMickael, Michel Edwar Khalil
PublisherDurham University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3901/

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