Larger bifurcation angles in the left coronary artery lead to lower wall shear stress and higher wall pressure gradients, which may promote atherogenesis.
Atherosclerosis is a cardiovascular condition that can occur in any part of the vascular system. Especially, it can exist in bifurcated arteries such as the left and right coronary arteries, abdominal aortic bifurcation or carotid artery bifurcation. In our study, we examine the left coronary artery as an exemplification using wall shear stress (WSS) and wall pressure gradient (WPG). Then, we attempt to find the relationship between bifurcated arterial geometry and hemodynamics. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a common technique applied to characterize blood flow accurately and assist us to gain an insight of atherosclerosis. In this paper, we used CFD as the computational hemodynamics analysis technique to examine flow through the left coronary artery that has variable angular bifurcation. Our results demonstrated that the region of low WSS area and magnitudes of maximum WPG increases with the angles of bifurcation. Such hemodynamic condition resulting from the large bifurcation angles has an effect on atherogenesis and is worthy of investigation for better understanding of atherosclerosis.
Zhang et al. (2016) studied this question.