Modelling blood flow regulation by nitric oxide in psoriatic plaques |
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Authors: | Sherratt Jonathan A Weller Richard Savill Nicholas J |
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Institution: | (1) Centre for Theoretical Modelling in Medicine, Department of Mathematics, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK;(2) Department of Surgery, UPMC, E 1557 Biomedical Science Tower, 200 Lothrop Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA |
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Abstract: | Psoriasis is a common skin disease, with a clinical appearance of red, scaly lesions, known as plaques. Recent experimental
research has shown that the ubiquitous cell-signalling molecule nitric oxide (NO) is actively synthesized within these plaques
by the iNOS enzyme. In contrast, NO production from normal, healthy skin is a by-product of the reduction of nitrite in sweat.
Measurement of NO release rates at the skin surface are 100 times greater from psoriatic lesions than normal skin. We propose
a mathematical model for the dynamics of NO within psoriatic plaques, that incorporates diffusion, production in the basal
epidermis, decay within the plaque, and active scavenging by red blood cell haemoglobin; this last effect introduces a key
nonlinearity into the model. We present numerical simulations of the model in two space dimensions, and then describe an approximation
that reduces the model to two coupled ordinary differential equations. This reduced system can be solved exactly, giving an
approximation for the NO release rate as an explicit function of model parameters. We use this approximation to explain some
recent, surprising experimental results. |
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