For many people, aortic dissection is fatal. The most common type is lethal in about half of patients, and death is almost instantaneous. “The dissection weakens the wall of the aorta,” Cooper explains. “It ruptures, blood escapes into the sac that surrounds the heart, and that stops the heart working—and they have a cardiac arrest.”
How common is aortic dissection?
How do you treat an aortic dissection?
For most people who are still alive when their dissection is spotted, the primary treatment is emergency open-heart surgery to remove the aorta and replace it with a tube, says Banerjee.