Aortic Dissection Complications During Treatment

[Dr. Sabeen Dhand]:
That aorta and that acute phase is fragile and you mentioned, the retrograde dissections are what you worry about among other things. In a patient who you have to treat acutely, they're coming in, they have rupture or amount or malperfusion that's requiring treatment then and there, what are some tips that you do that you try to avoid the complications like a retrograde dissection or stroke? Do you get in and out? Do you do just TEVAR? Do you dabble in the petticoat in that or use any adjunct techniques?

[Dr. Frank Arko]:
I think those are great questions. I think it's a little bit dependent upon what I'm seeing when I get in there. I think that if you've got the complicated dissection, I think about 15 to 20% of those patients will need some sort of adjunctive techniques. I guide everything as I go in. So I don't go into the procedure saying, "I'm going to do these five things." I start in the process of what I'm going to do, re-image, and then decide what needs to be done next.

So if you come in, I need to treat you hyperacutely. First, I want to get your blood pressure appropriate. So appropriate anti-impulse therapy. Depending on the level that I have to go up to. So if I have to cover left subclavian, I may or may not pace you. So I like to deploy under pacing. I just think it can be a little bit more accurate. We do some Type A dissections as well with TEVAR and some ascending work. So getting the ability to do TEVAR before you have to get to that stage and understanding how to do it, I think is a nice bridging to get to the next level if you want to go into zone one or zone zero.

So pacing I think is sometimes important. Two: IVUS through the case. So pre, post, and then deciding what you want to do next. To minimize that risk of retrograde type A dissection, I typically will tend to base my imaging off of IVUS. And again, if it's hyperacute and they come in with a blood pressure like 220, the thoracic aorta is much bigger. So I think you tend to oversize too much. So when you get them an appropriate anti-impulse therapy, you go back in there by IVUS. Their aorta is maybe 30, 31 rather than 40 or 42 when they come in.

So we can then decrease the size of the stent graft. Because if you're putting in, 40, 42 stent grafts in dissections, you really raise the risk of retrograde Type A dissection. So I think IVUS is important. When you come in and you talk about petticoat, I think there's certainly a need for petticoat in certain patients which is typically when the true lumen remains completely compressed through the visceral segment and the infrarenal. There have been sometimes maybe once a year and this is pre the petticoat when it was FDA approved. So it was approved outside the US first where we would have to put stents through that visceral segment to get it open.

But I'd say it's like 1 or 2% for that. I find that if we just go up do the TEVAR, we get pretty good expansion of the true lumen all the way through the visceral segment. We tend to be a little bit more aggressive in the amount of thoracic coverage that we do and this has again been a little bit of my own evolution over 22 years where I used to go in, put one piece. You hear people talk about it. So I just put in a single 10 piece for the TEVAR. I cover the entry there.

I used to do that but then I'd be back at six to eight weeks because it'd have aneurysmal degeneration distal to that because I was deploying in the still disease segment through the mid thoracic aorta that talk about stent graft induced new entry tears. It's not from stent grafts, it's just disease. So I now have a tendency to go further down. I tend to go about two to three centimeters above the celiac. You get into more normal aorta. I think you also get much better aortic remodeling, thoracic, long-term but then you bring in a little bit of risk of increased spinal cord ischemia.

We haven't really seen that there, but we certainly have it. We can usually recover it, but the data in China in which they've got a lot, when they've gone down that far ahead slightly increased risk of spinal cord ischemia. So when you become a little bit more aggressive, you have to manage that complication. Then once I do that, then I take a look at the visceral segments sort of see what's going on. I tend to be a little bit aggressive on treating the viscerals in the renals.

So if I see something that's even a little bit dynamic obstruction or if you have a static obstruction, I'm going to treat you for sure, but I will typically go in and put in a stent. I like to use covered stents in those areas. One, the vessels are big. They track easily. But with the covered stents, there's usually some fenestrations there that you can cover and you can sort of get better aortic remodeling if you can shut off that reentry flow into the false lumen off of visceral or a renal.

Then lastly if I had to, I put a petticoat in but that's like one, two, three, maybe at most 4% for me. I think there's more and more people putting it in. Maybe it's fine. Maybe I'm missing the charge on that one a little bit. But in my own practice, I haven't really felt the need to use it.