Abstract Late failure of bypass grafts is often related to the development of distal anastomotic intimal hyperplasia, a progressive thickening of the arterial wall which eventually occludes the graft-host junction. The pathogenesis and progression of distal intimal hyperplasia on the host artery bed is thought to be hemodynamically modulated, and a recent hypothesis 1 suggests that hyperplasia at this location may be correlated with the presence of a highly mobile stagnation point. This leads to a low average but highly variable wall shear stress (WSS) distribution on the bed. In this study, we investigated the effect of different flow waveforms on the local WSS patterns in an idealized end-to-side anastomosis model, concentrating on WSS distributions on the bed.
Steinman et al. (1995) studied this question.