What is Aortic Dissection?

you explain what aortic dissection is? Blood vessels have three layers to them, there's the intima which is on the inside, this is effectively a non-stick layer within the vessel whose function is various, it's to help to control the tone of the vessels but also to ensure that there's no clotting within the vessel. The next layer is the media which often contains the muscles of the artery which help again to control the tone and also help to allow elasticity and to regulate blood pressure throughout the cardiac cycle. The outside layer is the adventitia. This is a tougher layer which effectively encloses the other layers inside and provides a sort of protective sheath around the vessel. An aortic dissection normally occurs when blood gets between the intima and the adventitia. This can be due to an injury, it can be due to instrumentation by doctors or it can just be an area of a regular surface where there's some aortic disease and once the blood gets into that layer it effectively strips the intimate away by traveling down and inside the layer that it's formed. The effect of that is to squash the what we call the true lumen which is the old part of the vessel where the blood would normally flow, it squashes that to one side because a greater pressure builds up in this new false lumen which then propagates down the aorta and in the worst case scenarios will then compress the branches of the aorta and then reduce blood flow to vital organs. So I would say that aortic dissection as a pure definition is stripping of the intima away from the media by blood in an abnormal position.