Friday Fact: Endovascular Options

Minimally invasive and therefore conducive to a fast recovery, the endovascular approach to surgery describes the keyhole techniques performed to manage an aortic aneurysm. Endovascular simply means ‘inside the blood vessel’.

Two such techniques are: EVAR - Endovascular Aortic Repair and TEVAR - Thoracic Endovascular Aortic Repair

Instead of doing an ‘open’ operation in which the aneurysm is cut out and replaced with a graft, this technique involves feeding a wire into the aorta (usually through a small incision in the groin to access the femoral artery).

A stent can then be deployed in the aneurysmal part of the artery to prevent further problems.

The main advantage of this procedure is that it involves less time in hospital and less time recovering at home. It can also be used in patients who may have other illnesses that make conventional surgery higher risk for them.

The technique is currently used to fix aneurysms in the abdominal aorta and the descending aorta (the part of the aorta from the aortic arch to the diaphragm) but is not used to fix problems with the ascending aorta.