How can an aneurysm lead to a blood clot cause a stroke/heart <span title="attack/embolism/infarction???">attack/embolism/infarctio...</span>

Question

A patient suffers from severe leg pain while golfing. And start so pee discolored urine. He was misdiagnosed with muscle trauma when in reality he had a blocked artery in his leg caused by a popliteal artery aneurysm. By the time the blockage was diagnosed, a great deal of muscle tissue had already died and the patient eventually gets an infarction. My question is, how does a Popliteal Artery Aneurysm lead to a blood clot???

Answer 1

The aneurysm is just a long name for a bulge.  Instead of being a smooth channel for blood to flow thru, there is a small &quot;balloon&quot; shaped thing bulging out from the artery.  Not a big problem except that it is a place where the tissue has been stretched.  So it is thinner than the other parts of the artery.  That is what worries doctors.  Some day; maybe in 50 years, the stretched tissue will burst.  Then the blood escapes into your chest cavity and no one can see that you are dying until you fall down.

Answer 2

Because of the abnormalities in the artery, the immune system can get recruited to try to &#039;patch&#039; it by the injured cells. It does this by forming a clot, a scab on the inside of an artery. Since this clot is in the very fast moving blood stream of an artery, it can dislodge and get sucked along with the flow of things until it lodges somewhere over an artery that&#039;s too small for it to fit through.

If it blocks blood in the brain, it&#039;s a stroke. If it blocks it in the arteries that feed the heart muscle, it&#039;s a heart attack. Embolism is a generic term for the blockage. An infarction is the tissue dying as a result of the blockage.