What are the symptoms of an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm?

With regards to abdominal aortic aneurysms, generally they don't have any symptoms until and unless they rupture. They're usually picked up on scans, incidentally, for whatever other reason. For instance, you're having a scan of your belly because you've got some abdominal pain and someone thinks you might have gallstones and someone might notice an aneurysm. Or kidney stones, people often have CT scans and they pick up aneurysms there. Very, very rarely you can feel the aneurysm when you're being examined by a doctor, if it's quite large, but generally they're what we call asymptomatic and picked up on imaging. But occasionally they can give you symptoms and the symptoms you might get are abdominal pain or back pain or even loin pain, lower down in the lower back in the kidney area. I've seen a patient with pain in the groin, which was referred pain from an aneurysm in their abdomen. If an aneurysm is what we call mycotic or infective, this is a very rare occurrence. You may have fevers and sweats and feel generally unwell. But as I said, that's a very rare occurrence indeed. In terms of rupture, if an aneurysm does rupture, there's two types of rupture. is a free rupture into the belly itself, it's extremely unlikely that that's survivable because you'll lose all your circulating volume very, very quickly. If the rupture is contained in the back of the belly, the back of the belly wall behind the guts, then there is a possibility of getting to hospital and having a repair. I think the chances of survival are probably 50-50. The chances of getting to hospital are probably 50-50, and if you get a hospital the chances of a successful repair with a good outcome is about 50-50 as well I would say.