Word: aneurysms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...operation that only a few years ago would have seemed dangerous indeed. He slit open the 70-year-old duke's belly and cut down to the aorta, the body's main artery, on which he found a 4-in. section that had swollen into an aneurysm, much as an inner tube will balloon through a weakness in its rubber wall. In 67 min. of delicate surgery, Dr. DeBakey cut out the aneurysm and replaced it with a length of knitted Dacron tubing...
...largest of all arteries. It is a three-ply tube, about one inch in diameter where it descends through the abdomen, carrying blood for the lower organs and legs. The middle layer (the "media," to anatomists) is muscle, and it is a break in this layer that leads to aneurysms. In the vast majority of cases, the first cause of the break is unknown.* and the beginning of the aneurysm's growth may easily go undetected...
...duke had no hint of trouble until about four years ago. Then, during a routine checkup, Manhattan's Dr. Arthur Antenucci diagnosed an aneurysm that required watching. But it was too small at the time to justify the major surgery that would be involved in its removal. No special diet was needed, no drugs. How little distress the aneurysm caused the duke is shown by the fact that he was able to keep working steadily for most of this year on his movie, A King's Story...
...Rush. But this month the aneurysm grew rapidly. The elastic outer layer of the aorta was being stretched thinner and thinner, with increasing danger that it might burst and loose a fatal flood of blood into the abdominal cavity. Dr. Antenucci ordered X rays, which showed that the aneurysm had increased in size, and within a week had grown bigger than an orange. The beat of the blood pulsing through it could be felt by the doctor's hand. And it was in an especially dangerous location, below the branching of the kidney arteries (see diagram). It was time...
...DeBakey, who developed the operation and has already done it 6,500 times, the procedure was routine. But alter he made a 6-in. incision through the duke's lean abdominal wall, the surgeon discovered that the aneurysm was even bigger than expected. 'The size of a small cantaloupe or large grapefruit," he reported. Instead of a simple balloon shape with a neat "stalk," it was "fusiform," with its base extending along the aorta. Worse, the wall of the aorta had eroded until it was on the point of rupturing...