A Multiscale Model of Cardiac Concentric Hypertrophy Incorporating Both Mechanical and Hormonal Drivers of Growth

Growth and remodeling in the heart is driven by a combination of mechanical and hormonal signals that produce different patterns of growth in response to exercise, pregnancy, and various pathologies. In particular, increases in afterload lead to concentric hypertrophy, a thickening of the walls that increases the contractile ability of the heart while reducing wall stress. In the current study, we constructed a multiscale model of cardiac hypertrophy that connects a finite-element model representing the mechanics of the growing left ventricle to a cell-level network model of hypertrophic signaling pathways that accounts for changes in both mechanics and hormones. We first tuned our model to capture published in vivo growth trends for isoproterenol infusion, which stimulates β-adrenergic signaling pathways without altering mechanics, and for transverse aortic constriction (TAC), which involves both elevated mechanics and altered hormone levels. We then predicted the attenuation of TAC-induced hypertrophy by two distinct genetic interventions (transgenic Gq-coupled receptor inhibitor overexpression and norepinephrine knock-out) and by two pharmacologic interventions (angiotensin receptor blocker losartan and β-blocker propranolol) and compared our predictions to published in vivo data for each intervention. Our multiscale model captured the experimental data trends reasonably well for all conditions simulated. We also found that when prescribing realistic changes in mechanics and hormones associated with TAC, the hormonal inputs were responsible for the majority of the growth predicted by the multiscale model and were necessary in order to capture the effect of the interventions for TAC.