John Ritter sadly died of an undetecable medical condition where his aorta ruptured.
How does one’s aorta rupture? What can cause it? Are there tests that we should have done?
I always thought Ritter was healthy. A little on the hefty side, but he wasn’t overweight like Christ Farley or John Candy.
How does this happen?
There are two types of dissected aorta I believe. One of a sub-accute nature and an accute nature. John had the accute nature giving him no symptoms just a ruptured aorta. But a dissected aorta is when blood flowing out of your heart enters a tear or fissure in the lining of the aorta, and gets between the linging and the wall of the artery. Causing a massive heart attack.
Discovery magazine has a feature called something like Vital Signs where they discuss a case history of some dire but usually uncommon ailment that you can then spend the next month imagining that you have. About six months ago (date very uncertain), the case was a dissected aorta. As Antiquarian said, the aorta is composed of several layers. The layers can delaminate (very high blood pressure is one culprit). At that point, bad things happen. Anyway, if you can find that issue, it has a brief but understandable discussion of the phenomenon.
What a mental image!!!
The story from Discover that Finagle mentioned. July 2001, actually.
I haven’t checked the linked article, but in young people with aortic dissection the physician must consider:
The mode of death in a dissection may be due to a heart attack as mentioned above but can also be due to so-called cardiac tamponade (where the heart can’t fill or pump properly because it is being pressed on by a big clot), stroke, or even bleeding into the lining of the lungs.
For some reason I thought the aorta had ripped clean through and he bled into his chest cavity.
There was an episode of ER where Malucci gave thrombylitics to a patient with an aortic dissection and killed him. I didn’t understand all the medi-babble, but I think I have a better picture now.
Poor John. Such a young man.
An aneurysm is a ballooning of a blood vessel that increases the cross-sectional area over a small point, but decreases the strength of the blood vessel wall. “Abdominal aortic aneurysms” can certainly lead to aortic rupture. Medical folk usually consider an aneurysm as distinct from “aortic dissection”, but in the general terms of the OP, I would include aneurysms as a cause for “aortic rupture” (especially in more elderly people) along with the causes already discussed by KarlGauss.
Yesterday I read a story in Air and Space about a pilot who experienced an explosive decompression in an F-100 at 29,000 feet. It was much more severe than a broken window decompression as the entire canopy came off at once taking them from a 12,000 foot cabin altitutde to 29,000 feet virtually instantly The author was instructing form the back seat at the time. He suffered muscle and other tissue damage to his abdomen that later caused him to have multiple hernias. The pilot in the front apparently suffered a damaged aorta and died a year later when it tore from his heart as he was sitting up in bed.
I had an ascending aortic aneurism about ten years ago. In my case, it was caused by a connective tissue disorder (non-Marfan’s) that caused the layers of the aorta to spread. (I don’t think delaminate is the correct term, but it’s a very accurate description). I was fortunate in that it happened very slowly, most likely over months, and caused the aorta to baloon without rupturing. By the time I noticed the symptoms and went to the doctor, my aorta was 17 cm in cross section (around 3.5 cm is normal). I didn’t have any pain (until the surgeries), and my primary complaint was shortness of breath. It turned out that the aneurism had gotten large enough to start to compress the pulmonary artery. My case was extremely unusual, both in the size of the aneurism and in the fact that it did not dissect; I’ve been told they usually let go around 7 or 8 cm.
Although hypertension or drug abuse is often a cause of aneurism, sometimes it just happens. I was a 25 year old, reasonably athletic non-smoker. I was six foot, 150 pounds, biking 50-75 miles a week, skiing 100 days a year, with a resting blood pressure around 80/50. Just in my genes, I guess. I’m not nearly as active today, but I still run around 15 miles a week, and still bike quite a bit. I only get to ski a few days a year, though.