Getting your player ready...
A new study may help older people and their doctors decide how to treat a very common and dangerous problem — a bulging abdominal artery threatening to burst.
Fixing these weak spots by inserting a fabric sleeve into the artery, like a new tube in a bicycle tire, led to fewer deaths and complications than traditional surgery to implant this patch, the study found.
The study involved more than 45,000 Medicare patients, average age 76, with abdominal aortic aneurysms. In the study, nearly 5 percent of patients died after surgery compared with about 1 percent of those treated the less invasive way. The study was published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
