Influences on vascular wall smooth muscle cells with novel short-duration thermal angioplasty

We investigated the influences on smooth muscle cells after our novel short-duration thermal angioplasty, Photo-thermo Dynamic Balloon Angioplasty (PTDBA), to reveal the mechanism that can suppress neo-intimal hyperplasia after PTDBA. We obtained the sufficient arterial dilatations by short-duration heating (≤15 s, <70°C) and low dilatation pressure (<0.4 MPa) without arterial injuries in our previous in vivo studies. Smooth muscle cells, which play most important role in chronic treatment effects, were heated during PTDBA and stretch-fixed after PTDBA. The dead cell rate by heating, estimated by Arrhenius equation with A=2.5×10 ¹⁶ s ^-1 and E _a=1.17×10 ⁵ J mol ^-1, was 15.7±2.2% after PTDBA. The measured deformation rate of smooth muscle cells' nuclei was 1.6±0.1 after PTDBA in vivo. We found that the expression of smooth muscle cells' growth factor after PTDBA was inhibited 0.52 fold compared to that after the conventional balloon angioplasty in vivo. The measured neo-intimal hyperplasia occupancy rate was less than 20% after PTDBA in vivo. We prospect that the inhibition of the growth factor's expression by stretch-fixing may result to suppress the neo-intimal hyperplasia. In addition, the decrease of smooth muscle cells' density in the vessel media by heating might be another reason for the neo-intimal hyperplasia suppression.