Correlation between quantitative analysis of wall shear stress and intima-media thickness in atherosclerosis development in carotid arteries

BACKGROUND: This paper presents quantitative analysis of blood flow shear stress by measuring the carotid arterial wall shear stress (WSS) and the intima-media thickness (IMT) of experimental rabbits fed with high-fat feedstuff on a weekly basis in order to cause atherosclerosis. METHODS: This study is based on establishing an atherosclerosis model of high-fat rabbits, and measuring the rabbits’ common carotid arterial WSS of the experimental group and control group on a weekly basis. Detailed analysis was performed by using WSS quantification. RESULTS: We have demonstrated small significant difference of rabbit carotid artery WSS between the experimental group and the control group (P<0.01) from the 1st week onwards, while the IMT of experimental group had larger differences from 5th week compared with the control group (P<0.05). Next, we have shown that with increasing blood lipids, the rabbit carotid artery shear stress decreases and the rabbit carotid artery IMT goes up. The decrease of shear stress appears before the start of IMT growth. Furthermore, our receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve analysis showed that when the mean value of shear stress is 1.198 dyne/cm(2), the rabbit common carotid atherosclerosis fatty streaks sensitivity is 89.8%, and the specificity is 81.3%. The area under the ROC curve is 0.9283. CONCLUSIONS: All these data goes to show that WSS decreasing to 1.198 dyne/cm(2) can be used as an indicator that rabbit common carotid artery comes into the period of fibrous plaques. In conclusion, our study is able to find and confirm that the decrease of the arterial WSS can predict the occurrence of atherosclerosis earlier, and offer help for positive clinical intervention.