Aneurysm Treatment and Rupture Outcomes

Perfect. And what size of abdominal aortic aneurysm would require treatment? So if you've got no other sort of medical illnesses, generally a threshold of five and a half centimetres is what we would apply to start considering repair. But for some particular people with hereditary syndromes, we'll lower that threshold to five. For women sometimes who are generally smaller we can sometimes lower that threshold slightly and for people who perhaps have very complex aneurysms which involve both the chest and the abdomen we might actually raise the threshold to six centimeters so yeah somewhere around there. What happens if an abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture? So historically this was a fatal event and until the introduction of vascular surgery this was an unsurvivable event and and was sometimes just documented as a patient had a sudden death from a heart attack but in fact now we know that quite a large portion of men died from abdominal aortic aneurysm. These days it's still a serious event and it's still associated with a high mortality. If you make it to hospital, generally you're taken to a vascular centre and if there's time we perform a CT scan and that tells us whether your aneurysm is suitable for stenting. Generally, we know that in an emergency situation, especially if you're female, putting a stent in is generally associated with a better outcome for you. You're more likely to get home, less likely to spend more time on intensive care, less days in hospital. But there are people who have complex aneurysms certainly not suitable for stenting and for those patients we have to do an emergency operation and it's a high-risk operation and not everyone survives. Last but not least, is abdominal aortic aneurysm curable? So it's certainly curable and treatable and that's indeed the basis of our screening program in the UK and the idea is that we catch specifically men who have a higher rate of abdominal aortic aneurysm early at a time when they're in reasonable health and we then offer them the appropriate treatment for them and yes we can fix the aneurysms. Fantastic, great.