Vascular Medicine: A Companion to Braunwald's Heart Disease

Endovascular Therapy for Aortic Dissection

Acute aortic dissection (AAD) is a precipitous event associated with a wide range of outcomes from uncomplicated to catastrophic. Current endovascular strategies are based on identifying features that portend increased risk of death or other poor outcome, and applying interventional…

Surgical Therapy for Aortic Dissection

Morgagni described the first cases of aortic dissection in 1773, and Maunoir coined the entity “aortic dissection.” Despite these early reports of thoracic aortic disease, it was not until 1952 that Drs. De Bakey and Cooley first successfully operated on…

Carotid Artery Revascularization

The management of carotid artery disease remains a topic of current investigation and vigorous debate regarding optimal treatments. Multiple prospective randomized controlled trials have compared the standard therapies, which include carotid endarterectomy (CEA), carotid artery stenting (CAS), and best medical…

Prevention and Treatment of Stroke

The medical management of stroke encompasses a wide range of therapies that include managing physiological parameters in the acute phase, reducing the extent of acute injury, and preventing recurrent strokes. Ischemic stroke is the most common form of cerebrovascular disease…

Epidemiology of Cerebrovascular Disease

Overview Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 4 million deaths in 2004. Cerebrovascular disease is currently the fifth most common cause of death in the United States behind diseases of the heart, cancer, chronic lower…

Vasculogenic Erectile Dysfunction

The first historical descriptions of erectile dysfunction (ED) date back to Egyptian papyrus, nearly 4000 years ago. Egyptian scholars described two types of ED: a “natural” form in which the man was not capable of performing the sex act and…

Clinical Evaluation and Treatment of Mesenteric Vascular Disease

Clinical evaluation of possible mesenteric ischemia begins with an appropriate index of suspicion for the diagnosis followed by a careful history and physical examination. The major categories of mesenteric ischemia include chronic mesenteric ischemia (CMI), acute occlusive mesenteric ischemia (AMI),…

Epidemiology and Pathophysiology of Mesenteric Vascular Disease

Mesenteric vascular disease can be characterized as acute or chronic, symptomatic or asymptomatic. Severe acute intestinal ischemia results from sudden symptomatic reduction in intestinal blood flow of sufficient magnitude to result potentially in intestinal infarction. Acute ischemia of the small…