Abstract
The causes of arteriosclerosis are intensively investigated since many decades. While circumferential wall stress has received a lot of attention, axial stress (also called “longitudinal” stress) has been largely neglected, and practically never incriminated. However, it has been suggested in 2003 that moderate and severe arterial stenoses may induce non negligible axial forces cyclically in the vessel segment just proximal to the constriction cone. In the present contribution, we describe a simple analytical model that allows to study the distribution of these forces along the vessel in dependence of the respective axial elasticities of vessel and surrounding tissues, and of the stenosis length.