查看文章

To ascertain whether acute aortic dissection (AAD) remains the most common aortic catastrophe, as generally believed, and to detect any improvement in outcomes compared with previously reported populationbased data.

We determined the incidence, operative intervention rate, and long-term survival rate of Olmsted County, Minnesota, residents with a clinical diagnosis of AAD initially made between 1980 and 1994. The incidence of degenerative thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA) rupture was also delineated. We compared these results with other population-based studies of AAD, degenerative TAA, and abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) rupture.

During a 15-year period, we identified 177 patients with thoracic aortic disease. We focused on 39 patients with AAD (22% of the entire cohort) and 28 with TAA rupture (16%). The annual age- and sex-adjusted incidences were 3.5 …