I just read an article in the Long Beach Business Journal about this. I had no idea how common it is. My concern is my dad had a ruptured brain aneurysm 25 years ago at the age of 55, and died last year from an aortic aneurysm. I am 46, should I be screened?
Luana,
Please do. Obviously this is a heartfelt subject for you, so wouldn’t you feel better knowing?
Cerebral and aortic aneurysms are just beginning to be linked. For many years medical doctors said there was no link, but now there is gaining acceptance of similar causes. Aneurysms can happen anywhere in the body (former VP Cheney had one behind his knee) but more commonly they occur in the aorta, the brain (cerebral), lungs (thoracic), spleen ( splenetic) the liver and elsewhere in the body (popliteal). Many of the causes are: smoking, high blood pressure, genetics (having more than 2 blood relatives who have had a rupture, or have been diagnosed with an aneurysm of any kind is an automatic check!), extreme cocaine/alcohol use, atherosclerosis, certain genetic diseases (Marfan disease, polycystic kidney disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Neurofibromatosis) and infection.
You’ll feel so much better knowing. You don’t want to go through a rupture, I have at age 46.
Please let us know what you do.
JulieNH
Thanks, Julie for your thoughtful reply. You really got all the information to Luana correctly. I would also recommend reviewing our Medical Advisory Board’s recommendations for screening at-
http://www.bafound.org/early-detection-and-screening
But the bottom line is, if it is keeping you up at night worrying about it, better to know one way or the other. If there is something there, early detection means you can treat the problem if it needs treatment.
Do you have a web link to any findings on the possible connection between cerebral and aortic aneurysms? The only link I found by googling was a cryptic statement that so far no link between the two had been found.
I had an unruptured brain aneurysm clipped in 2002 and, as a former smoker and someone using meds to control high blood pressure, I am wondering whether I should get screened for aortic aneurysms.
P.S. I got amazing advice and support on this forum (from all over the world) that helped me through the decision to have surgery, stayed on the forum for a year or so to try and give back by helping others going through it, and just now returning.
Here are some links. Some are just abstracts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2742216/
http://www.medscape.com/medline/abstract/18647115
http://hyper.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/52/2/195
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18176561
You canfind more by typing in Chromosome 9 + aneurysm.
Thank you for going to all that bother for me. Since I don’t speak medical lingo too well, some of it was pretty dense to me, but I can see that I’m going to have drag myself to a doctor for testing. My mother had super-high blood pressure and a giant aortic aneurysm before she died, so that pretty much clinches it.