Health Resources: Neurosurgery://on-call, published October 2000 and Daily University Science News, published April 2001 are two articles about how smoking can enlarge and even burst an aneurysm. I selected these articles for personal reasons. My aunt just recently died of an intracranial aneurysm. When they did the autopsy they said the cause for the rupture was from smoking. The subject I chose relates to this course because its health related and also because it relates to emergency response, what we have been learning about since the beginning of the year. The two articles are very comparable, but in a way they are dissimilar and they are both effective in their own way.
The first article by Health Resources called "Neurosurgeons Find Strong Association Between Cigarette Smoking and Aneurysm Rupture" talks about how neurosurgeons have discovered that cigarette smoking is a risk factor for the rupturing of aneurysms. The AANS found a key involvement between smoking cigarettes and by smoking it increases the size of and unruptured lesion and perhaps the rupturing of it. It goes on to talk about the effects and the definition of an aneurysm. It explains that 30,000 people suffer from intracranial aneurysm each year and of that 60% die or are disabled. Half the people who survive aren't able to return to work or suffer from neuropsychological and volitional processes. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance angiographies (MRA) detect small and large intracranial aneurysm even in healthy people. "Intracranial aneurysms are thought to be acquired degenerative lesions that form because of hemodynamic stress form circulating blood, or in a few patients, because of connective tissue disease." This is the general definition that they use in this article of what an aneurysm is. It goes on to talk about some statistics of the rupturing aneurysms. The association between cigarette smoking and the risk of ensuing rupture suggest that smoking increases the size of an unruptured lesion.
