Word: eastlund
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Until quite recently, not much had changed in the treatment of aneurysms, as Ardith Eastlund learned after her twin sister Arlene Erickson died of a ruptured one last fall in Reed City, Mich., at 64. The sisters were identical in so many ways that Eastlund naturally wondered whether she too might be carrying a time bomb in her brain. "I just want to put my mind--and my family--at ease," she told Dr. B. Gregory Thompson, chief of cerebrovascular surgery at the University of Michigan...
Unfortunately, Thompson couldn't do that for her. Although Eastlund wasn't prone to headaches or the other symptoms, tests revealed that she had an aneurysm in her brain, just as her sister...
Suddenly, Eastlund and her husband Dale faced a terrible choice. They could do nothing and hope that the aneurysm would never start to leak. Or she could get the standard treatment, first performed in 1937, in which a neurosurgeon drills a hole in the skull and puts a clip (usually titanium) around the blister-like pouch. Or she could try something new: a procedure called coiling, approved...
...works like this: a surgeon feeds a catheter from the groin into the affected blood vessel and then seeds the aneurysm with tiny platinum coils that promote clotting (see diagram). This seemed safer to Eastlund and would spare her a major operation. But, she wanted to know, are coils as effective as clips...
...sees the value of coiling for hard-to-reach aneurysms, Thompson, like a lot of neurosurgeons, is still a little skeptical. "Sixteen months isn't long enough," he says. "We won't know for sure how effective the coils are until we follow patients for 10 years or more." Eastlund, unfortunately, doesn't have that long. She has to make a decision in the next few weeks...
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