What is Complicated Aortic Dissection?

Complicated aortic dissection could also be divided into type A and type B. Type A, you can think of it as almost always complicated and need to go to the operating room right away, and that is life-saving operation for type A aortic section. For type B aortic section, most of the time it is not complicated, meaning patients have an initial chest pain, it gets treated with blood pressure control, and then they will be discharged home on oral pills that they take at home and they control blood pressure and life will gradually return to normal. However, the patients that show up in the emergency department with a complicated type B aortic dissection, meaning they have one of two things. They either have a rupture of their aorta, meaning blood is outside their aorta, or they have what we call malperfusion, meaning inadequate blood flow going to their intestine and causing intestinal ischemia or part of their bowel or intestine will die, or renal ischemia, which meaning inadequate blood flow to the kidneys and that will cause them to have kidney failure or part of the kidney will die, and or leg ischemia, which means one or two legs are not getting adequate blood flow. And all these are emergencies that need to be addressed right away for complicated type B dissection.