NEW YORK (Reuters Health), Jul 14 - More than a quarter of patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) also have thoracic aortic aneurysms (TAA), and the proportion is twice as high in women, Swedish researchers report in a June 21 online paper in the Annals of Surgery.
The finding that TAAs are more common in female AAA patients might explain why women have higher rates of AAA-related deaths than men do, said lead author Dr. Emma Larsson of Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, and colleagues.
The researchers note there have been few studies of the concomitance of these conditions and their frequency is not well defined.
To investigate further, they examined abdominal and thoracic CT scans from 354 AAA outpatients. Patients' mean age was 74 years, and 80 (23%) were women. Comorbidities were similar in men and women although significantly more women were smokers.
Overall, 100 patients (28%) had a TAA, including 38 women (48% of all the women; odds ratio, 3.09) and 62 men (23%).
Given the high incidence of TAA, the researchers conclude, "We need to increase the efforts to diagnose this nowadays often treatable disease in the thoracic aorta in AAA patients."
But as their paper points out, for the present at least, diagnosis will be complicated by the fact that there are no standard criteria for a "normal-sized" thoracic aorta.
Source: link.reuters.com/rev37m
Ann Surg 2010.
Last Updated: 2010-07-13 14:43:49 -0400 (Reuters Health)
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