Robert D. Brown Jr., M.D., M.P.H. , E. Paul Lindell, M.D. , Giuseppe Lanzino, M.D. , and Harry Cloft, M.D., Ph.D. , explain what a brain aneurysm is and the different treatment options there are at Mayo Clinic for a patient with a brain aneurysm.
Mayo Clinic neurovascular experts care for 17,000 people each year with aneurysms, strokes, and other blood vessel and cerebrovascular conditions.
Each brain aneurysm is unique. Your doctor will use state-of-the-art arterial imaging to evaluate, diagnose and assess the aneurysm's risk of rupture. Every patient has team of doctors working together to create an individualized path of care. Some aneurysms do not require surgery and are closely monitored instead.
Mhm. Yeah. We have techniques available now for brain aneurysms that we could have only dreamed of 30 years ago. The United States alone. About six million people have a brain aneurysm, most of whom live their life and never become aware that they have a brain aneurysm. A brain aneurysm is a little secular out poaching sometimes called a berry aneurysm. And the consequences is that it is possible that they can rupture. What we do is we image using C. T. M. R. And angiography and using one of those, we evaluate the blood vessels. The question when we make a diagnosis of a brain aneurysm that has not ruptured is what do we do about it? Can it safely be left alone on the diagnostic side? I think we can image better than we ever could. So we can see all the nuances that could guide us to better therapy. And then the therapies are getting better by leaps and bounds. Mhm. Many of these problems can be effectively dealt with by going through the blood vessels and without the need to expose the brain or the spinal cord. The endovascular techniques continue to evolve treating the aneurysm from within via a little plastic catheter that's put in a groin artery. Advanced all the way up into the aneurysm and there continue to be new and evolving techniques, some of which have originated in terms of some of the basic research here at Mayo Clinic. A major advance that has really impressed me is flow diversion for the treatment of cerebral aneurysms. Those are stents which are a mesh tube that diverts the flow along the length of the tube in and out of the aneurysm. And then the aneurysm goes away gradually over time. And that has really made a lot of aneurysms that were quite difficult to treat quite easy to treat. Now there is no question that the safety and the success rate of our procedures on both sides and the vascular and open surgery as an increased dramatically, we focus on what's best for the patient If we need expertise outside of the neuroscience group, whether being cardiology, clinical genomics, psychiatry, psychology or in the hospital setting, we have expertise in all of those areas as well. And the patient knows and the referring physicians know that we are focusing truly on what's best for the patient.
