High level endurance sports, like biking, may lead to a vascular pathology called endofibrosis. Its symptoms are an arterial wall thickening and a reduction of the artery lumen calibre. Cyclists are impacted in the iliac arteries due to a pinching and kinking mechanism, but other athletes may be vulnerable like rowers, triathletes or soccer players (Feugier and Chevalier 2004). This pathology was addressed increasingly over the years in the vascular surgery literature (INSITE Collaborators 2016). Arterial endofibrosis is a hypertrophic arterial remodelling pathology that affects a young and healthy population. According to Pr Feugier, specialist of this pathology in Lyon’s South Hospital (Feugier and Chevalier 2004), endofibrosis is close to another vascular pathology, called myointimal hyperplasia.
The development mechanisms of endofibrosis involves several factors and phenomena, such as hemodynamics, biochemistry, cells evolution, etc. We focus here on the biomechanical modelling of the endofibrosis in the iliac artery. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of this disease by a model that couples cell population evolution, hemodynamics, biochemical evolution of growth factors. The model is expected to permit a parametric analysis, and to provide prediction data about the most important mechanisms at play, which we illustrate here on a case of initially wounded artery.
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