Word: aortic
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Sudden death is always shocking, but there was something particularly unsettling about the way actor John Ritter died last week. He suffered what is known as an aortic dissection, an uncommon condition in which the major artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body basically tears itself apart. More precisely, blood, which is propelled by the beating heart, gets between layers of the arterial wall and pushes them apart, moving down the blood vessel like a run racing down a nylon stocking...
...might expect, if the tear occurs close to the heart, death can occur in minutes. Indeed, half of all patients who suffer this kind of aortic catastrophe die within 24 hours. "The key is to make the diagnosis," says Dr. Michael Deeb, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The pain of aortic dissection is often mistaken for that of a heart attack. But if the dissection is detected in time and there's no damage to other organs in the body, surgeons can successfully replace the torn section of aorta with a synthetic graft...
FETAL HEARTS In a surgical first, doctors fixed a deadly heart-valve defect in a 5-month-old fetus. Guided by ultrasound, they angled a needle-thin catheter into the aortic valve, a spot one-eighth of an inch in diameter in a beating heart the size of a grape. A minuscule balloon was then inflated to enlarge the constricted valve, which had been obstructing the flow of blood to the body. Eleven weeks later, doctors induced early labor, anticipating the need for another operation, but the repair job had worked so well that the 5-lb. 8-oz. healthy...
RECOVERING. BOB DOLE, 77, the 1996 Republican presidential candidate turned Viagra pitchman; from surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm; in Cleveland, Ohio. In an experimental procedure, Dole's surgical team inserted a permanent stent into his aorta...
...real emotional connection with the people onstage, for one thing. The late composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson earns our tears even before we walk into the theater. He died, tragically, of an aortic aneurysm just weeks before his soon-to-be-a-hit Rent opened. Now one of his earlier works, Tick, Tick...Boom!, has been revived off-Broadway. It's a slight, autobiographical piece (with a script worked over by David Auburn, author of Proof) about the struggling composer's own angst at reaching his 30th birthday. Yet this Portrait of the Artist as a Young Neurotic makes...