Coarctation of the aorta in an adult, with death due to the rupture of an aneurysm in the neck / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Coarctation of the aorta in an adult, with death due to the rupture of an aneurysm in the neck / by F. Parkes Weber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    0 varied greatly even in cases in which the aortic stenosis was extreme. The heart was stated to have remained normal throughout life in 9 of the 129 cases, including Reynaud’s case of a man aged 92 years (already referred to) ; Brunner’s case, in which there was an actual obliteration of the aortic channel at the insertion of the ductus arteriosus ; and Dumontpallier’s case (the patient was aged 39 years), in which the aortic stenosis was due to a septum with a central aperture, 13 mm. in diameter. Seventy-seven cases showed marked hypertrophy and dilatation of the heart, but 44 of them were complicated with chronic valvular lesions or other cardiac defects, which might have given rise to cardiac hypertrophy. Hence it appears that hypertrophy of the heart is not an invariable consequence of aortic coarctation. According to Abbott, aneurysm of the aortic arch occurred in only 9 of the 129 cases, and in 5 of them it was of the dissecting form ; rupture of the aorta occurred in 12 cases, of the ascending aorta in 7 cases, and at the site of the stenosis in 5 cases. Amongst still more recent contributions to the literature of the subject we may mention accounts bv A. M. Gossage0 (a boy, aged 17 years, with characteristic arterial collateral circulation), R. 0. Moon 7 (with necropsy), A. Brown8 (with large tortuous superficial arteries variously disposed over the right thoracic wall), Herbert French 9 (a doubtful case), and Hugo Sella10 (extreme stenosis of the aortic isthmus in a man, aged 43 years, with perforation of a dissecting aortic aneurysm into the pericardium). George Carpenter1 has described a case of coarctation of the aorta with great enlargement of superficial arteries in a boy, aged 5 years, who was believed to have inherited syphilis. We should further like to include as an example of the “adult type,” with extensive arterial collateral circulation, the case of a woman, aged 55 years, shown by F. Langmead at the Clinical Section of the Royal Society of Medicine on May 31st, 1912, for we cannot think of any other explana- * Gossage : Loc. cit. 7 R. O. Moon: The Lancet, June 8th, 1912, p. 1531. x A. Drown : The Lancet, June 22nd, 1912, p. 1719. 9 H. French: Transactions of the Medical Society of London, 1911, vol. xxxiv., p. 426. 10 H. Sella : Ziegler’s Beitriige zur Pathologischen Anatomic und zur Allgemeinen Pathologie, Jena, 1910, vol. xlix., p. 501. 11 G. Carpenter: Reports of the Society for the Study of Disease in Children, London, 1908, vol. viii., p. 158.