Wall stiffening is a primary contributor to motility loss in Crohn's disease: an electromechanical modeling study
- 1University of Notre Dame
Abstract
Fibrotic strictures are among the most disabling complications of Crohn's disease, permanently narrowing the bowel and impairing motility, yet no approved therapy reverses them. Chronic inflammation alters pacemaker-network coupling, smooth-muscle excitability, and calcium-dependent contractility, while fibrosis thickens the bowel wall, narrows the lumen, and changes tissue mechanics. The relative contributions of these coupled electrical, contractile, and structural alterations to motility loss remain unclear. To address this gap, we develop an integrated electromechanical finite-element framework for fibrostenosing Crohn's disease that couples a fibrosis-driven growth model with a FitzHugh-Nagumo electromechanical model. A full-factorial 25 design of experiments is used to quantify the relative effects of electrical diffusivity, excitation threshold, peak active stress, wall stiffness, and hypertrophic remodeling on cyclic lumen-volume deformation. Motility is quantified by the standard deviation of lumen volume over one contraction cycle. Within the parameter ranges examined, increased wall stiffness emerged as the dominant contributor to motility loss, followed by impaired smooth-muscle contractility. Changes in excitation threshold, hypertrophic remodeling, and electrical diffusivity produced substantially smaller effects. Pairwise interactions were small relative to the dominant main effects, indicating that the mechanisms contributed largely through their individual effects. Our findings suggest that limiting wall stiffening while preserving smooth-muscle contractile function may provide a therapeutic strategy for maintaining intestinal motility in fibrostenosing Crohn's disease.
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BibTeX
@misc{krishnan2026wall,
title = {{Wall stiffening is a primary contributor to motility loss in Crohn's disease: an electromechanical modeling study}},
author = {A. Anantha Krishnan and M. Abubaker and M. A. Holland},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.20.752998},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.20.752998v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Wall stiffening is a primary contributor to motility loss in Crohn's disease: an electromechanical modeling study
AU - A. Anantha Krishnan
AU - M. Abubaker
AU - M. A. Holland
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/20
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.20.752998
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.20.752998v1
AB - Fibrotic strictures are among the most disabling complications of Crohn's disease, permanently narrowing the bowel and impairing motility, yet no approved therapy reverses them. Chronic inflammation alters pacemaker-network coupling, smooth-muscle excitability, and calcium-dependent contractility, while fibrosis thickens the bowel wall, narrows the lumen, and changes tissue mechanics. The relative contributions of these coupled electrical, contractile, and structural alterations to motility loss remain unclear. To address this gap, we develop an integrated electromechanical finite-element framework for fibrostenosing Crohn's disease that couples a fibrosis-driven growth model with a FitzHugh-Nagumo electromechanical model. A full-factorial 25 design of experiments is used to quantify the relative effects of electrical diffusivity, excitation threshold, peak active stress, wall stiffness, and hypertrophic remodeling on cyclic lumen-volume deformation. Motility is quantified by the standard deviation of lumen volume over one contraction cycle. Within the parameter ranges examined, increased wall stiffness emerged as the dominant contributor to motility loss, followed by impaired smooth-muscle contractility. Changes in excitation threshold, hypertrophic remodeling, and electrical diffusivity produced substantially smaller effects. Pairwise interactions were small relative to the dominant main effects, indicating that the mechanisms contributed largely through their individual effects. Our findings suggest that limiting wall stiffening while preserving smooth-muscle contractile function may provide a therapeutic strategy for maintaining intestinal motility in fibrostenosing Crohn's disease.
ER -