Is Aortic Dissection Fatal?

Is aortic dissection fatal? And so there are two types of aortic dissection, type A, which arises closer to the heart and type B, which arises further around the aortic arch. With the type A dissection, generally speaking, if you don't have surgery for it, then you almost inevitably will die. The reason for that is that blood gets into the layer surrounding the heart, or it can rupture the aorta, or it can restrict blood flow to the blood vessels to the head and also the rest of the body. So in that case, without surgery, there's almost 100% risk of death. With a type B dissection, it depends on, again, what's happening within the aorta. If the blood has stripped the intima away and there's no compression of the blood vessels and it's not causing any symptoms and it doesn't cause an out-of-control blood pressure then it can be managed medically and so the mortality rate from patients with this condition is probably less than 10% as an inpatient. If you have those features which I just described then the risk of death suddenly goes up and those are the patients which require surgery so I would say that with type A dissection absolutely if it's not treated with type B dissection depends on the configuration. The other thing that it will depend on which is crucial is the arriving at the right diagnosis and as I mentioned before chest pain is caused by a lot of things some of these things are very benign and some are more serious. In a younger patient with the history of some other medical problems like for example gastroesophageal reflux, then angioid dissection can be misdiagnosed and there are lots of cases of younger patients not having the correct diagnosis and then ending up with a very poor outcome. So half the battle in these situations is thinking of the right diagnosis and getting the right investigations.