Sara Roccabianca

We introduce a novel and physiologically relevant way of measuring perivascular adipose tissue (PVAT) mechanical stiffness which shows that PVAT’s low, yet measurable, stiffness is linearly correlated with the amount of collagen fibers present within the tissue. Including PVAT in the measurement of the aortic wall’s mechanical behavior is important, and it significantly affects the resulting metrics by decreasing aortic stiffness.