What is an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm?

Tell me more about yourself. Hi Majid, I'm Ankur Thapar, I'm a consultant vascular surgeon based at Mid and South Essex Hospitals at the Basildon site and I'm here just to give you a little bit of information about some of the work that we do there. Perfect. Can you tell me more about your vascular surgery interests? What kind of interest do you have in vascular surgery? Yeah, so I treat conditions mainly off the main blood vessel in the body, the aorta, and also do a lot of work with my colleagues in diabetes and orthopedics on limb salvage, particularly with foot ulcers, and also I work with the renal team that look after people with failing kidneys to provide dialysis access, which is AV fistulas and dialysis catheters. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so can you tell me about what is abnormal aortic aneurysm? So when the main blood vessel in either the chest or the belly expands to more than three centimeters we call that an aneurysm and that means that the artery is abnormally large and weak walled and that means it's prone to swell more and we know that leaving that long term there can be risks associated with that and it really depends on how big the artery is and whether you have any sort of history in the family of any problems to do with that.