Senator Lindsey Graham died on Saturday, July 11th, at 71.The medical examiner’s preliminary finding was an aortic dissection, a tear in the wall of the aorta, the large artery that carries blood out of the heart. The final death certificate is still pending. Most of the coverage called it “sudden.” Aortic disease is usually silent until it tears or bursts.<\/p>\n
The aorta is the body’s largest artery, running from the heart down through the chest and abdomen. Three different things can go wrong with it. They’re related but not the same, and they get confused all the time.<\/p>\n
An aneurysm is a bulge. A weak spot in the aortic wall stretches and balloons outward. It happens slowly, over years, and usually causes no symptoms, which is why most aneurysms are found by accident on a scan done for something else. An aneurysm is defined by size. The wider it grows, the thinner and more fragile the wall gets, and the higher the odds that it will eventually fail.<\/p>\n
A dissection is a tear. Blood breaks through the inner lining and forces its way into the wall itself, splitting the layers apart and carving a false channel. This one is sudden and is a true emergency, usually announced by abrupt, tearing chest or back pain. It doesn’t require an aneurysm first. A dissection can strike an aorta that was never enlarged, which is part of why it gets missed.<\/p>\n
A rupture is a burst. The wall gives way completely, and blood pulses out where it shouldn’t, into the chest or the sac around the heart. It’s the usually fatal ending that either an aneurysm or a dissection can lead to, and it can kill in minutes.<\/p>\n
Bulge, tear, burst. One can set off another, but they aren’t the same. Dissection skews older, driven by high blood pressure and hardened arteries. An aneurysm in a younger person is more likely to be inherited, caused by a weakness in the connective tissue itself.<\/p>\n
That difference is what separated Graham from my husband. Graham’s aorta, at 71, tore, a dissection along a wall stiffened by decades of what the medical examiner called arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.My husband Grant Wahl’s bulged and burst, at an age when this disease usually means something inherited.<\/p>\n
Source: CBS News<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Senator Lindsey Graham died on Saturday, July 11th, at 71.The medical examiner’s preliminary finding was an aortic dissection, a tear in the wall of the aorta, the large artery that carries blood out of the heart. The final death certificate is still pending. Most of the coverage called it “sudden.” Aortic disease is usually silent […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/god-bless-usa.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}