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Mechanics

Aneurysmal blood vessels are prone to rupture under normal blood pressure and flow due to the special mechanical properties that make them weaker. To better understand this phenomenon, we can first look at healthy arterial vessels which exhibit a J-shaped stress-strain curve with high strength and high toughness (for a biomaterial in vivo). Unlike crystalline materials whose linear elastic region follows Hooke's Law under uniaxial loading, many biomaterials exhibit a J-shaped stress-strain curve which is non-linear and concave up. The blood vessel can be under large strain, or the amount of stretch the blood vessel can undergo, for a range of low applied stress before fracture, as shown by the lower part of the curve. The area under the curve up to a given strain is much lower than that for the equivalent Hookean curve, which is correlated to toughness. Toughness is defined as the amount of energy per unit volume material can absorb before rupturing. Because the amount of energy released is proportional to the amount of crack propagation, the blood vessel wall can withstand pressure and is "tough". Thus, healthy blood vessels with the mechanical properties of the J-shaped stress-strain curve have greater stability against aneurysms than materials with linear elasticity.

Blood vessels with aneurysms, on the other hand, are under the influence of an S-shaped stress-strain curve. As a visual aid, aneurysms can be understood as a long, cylindrical balloon. Because it's a tight balloon under pressure, it can pop at any time stress beyond a certain force threshold is applied. In the same vein, an unhealthy blood vessel has elastic instabilities that lead to rupture. Initially, for a given radius and pressure, stiffness of the material increases linearly. At a certain point, the stiffness of the arterial wall starts to decrease with increasing load. At higher strain values, the area under the curve increases, thus increasing the impact on the material that would promote crack propagation. The differences in the mechanical properties of the aneurysmal blood vessels and the healthy blood vessels stem from the compositional differences of the vessels. Compared to normal aortas, aneurysmal aortas have a much higher volume fraction of collagen and ground substance (54.8% vs. 95.6%) and a much lower volume fraction of elastin (22.7% vs. 2.4%) and smooth muscles (22.6% vs. 2.2%), which contribute to higher initial stiffness. It was also found that the ultimate tensile strength, or the strength to withstand rupture, of aneurysmal vessel wall is 50% lower than that of normal aortas. The wall strength of ruptured aneurysmal aortic wall was also found to be 54.2 N/cm, which is much lower than that of a repaired aorta wall, 82.3 N/cm. Due to the change in composition of the arterial wall, aneurysms overall have much lower strength to resist rupture. Predicting the risk of rupture is difficult due to the regional anisotropy the hardened blood vessels exhibit, meaning that the stress and strength values vary depending on the region and the direction of the vessel they are measured along.