Acute aortic dissection is a tear in the aorta (the main blood vessel from the heart). This requires emergency treatment. Sadly, aortic dissection is often fatal. This is often caused by late or missed diagnosis.
Aortic dissections usually happen in patients with aortic enlargement (also called aortic aneurysm). This can be caused by inherited diseases, or can be due to age, high blood pressure and smoking.
Patients diagnosed with an aneurysm have regular scans of the aorta. If the aneurysm gets too big, patients have surgery to fix it. However, these scans do not pick up all patients who are at risk of dissection. Also, Aneurysms do not usually cause symptoms. This means that many patients don't know they have them until they rupture.
It is very hard to diagnose a rupture in emergency settings. This is one of the reasons why the death rate is so high. It is also hard to know how well or how poorly people will do after they have had a dissection. It would be ideal if there was a simple blood test that could be used. This could be used to identify people who have had a dissection and help find those at risk of dissection. We could also use it to figure out how people will do after a dissection. We have recently developed a biomarker assay that could be used for this. To confirm these findings, we would like to use blood samples from patients who had acute aortic dissection. These samples will support the development of new aortic dissection diagnostics.
