What is an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm?

So, what's an abdominal aortic aneurysm? So, the aorta is the main pipe taking blood down from the heart to the legs. It's got lots of branches for the guts and the kidneys. At the end of the path of the aorta, it splits into two iliac arteries for the two legs and two sides of the pelvis. Now, an aneurysm is a swelling from the normal size of the artery and it's usually defined as either one and a half times the normal sort of upper limit of the artery. The aorta is typically a centimeter and a half in us, slightly larger in men, slightly smaller in women. So an aneurysm would probably be defined as something over two and a bit centimeters in size. A small aneurysm has a very low risk of rupture or bursting, which is the main sort of thing that we worry about with aneurysms, a larger aneurysm as it gets larger and larger has a larger and larger risk and we'll talk about that in subsequent videos.