In emergency and vascular medicine, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a life-threatening dilation of the abdominal aorta whose risk is elevated by age, male sex, smoking, family history, and peripheral arterial disease, and whose clinical suspicion must be maintained despite nonspecific presenting symptoms (back, flank, or abdominal pain, syncope, or shock) because rupture causes rapid, massive hemorrhage. Diagnostic and management strategy is governed by hemodynamic stability (favoring bedside ultrasound for unstable patients and contrast CT for stable patients, given their differing sensitivity, portability, and anatomic detail trade-offs) and by aneurysm size, which stratifies rupture risk and determines whether management is non-emergent outpatient follow-up, urgent surgical follow-up, or emergent surgical intervention.
In emergency and vascular medicine, abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a life-threatening dilation of the abdominal aorta whose risk is elevated by age, male sex, smoking, family history, and periphe…