Endovascular stent-graft treatment of thoracic aortic syndromes: A 7-year experience

Thoracic aortic diseases (TAD) are relatively frequent conditions associated with high mortality. Recently, several reports have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of endovascular stent-graft (EVG) placement for TAD as an alternative to open surgery.We report our experience in management of thoracic aortic syndrome on 56 consecutive patients with TAD that underwent endovascular stent-graft repair.MDCT angiography was used in all patients to provide preprocedure evaluation and measurements. In particular it is necessary to evaluate the proximal and distal landing zones of the stent-graft.All EVGs in our series were placed successfully. Conversion to open surgery was never required. Six patients (10.7%) died early after the stent-graft deployment. During follow-up four more patients died. The endoleak rate was 16.7% (no. 10 pt). We did not observe any case of paraplegia.The present study shows the efficacy of EVG in the long-term follow-up, with an overall survival of 82.1%, which is comparable to that reported in recent studies. In conclusion this technique is emerging as an alternative approach in the treatment of TAD because this approach offers a less invasive therapeutic option to standard surgical techniques, even in patients who have associated diseases that make them poor surgical candidates.