What are the symptoms of a Cranial Aneurysm?
Cranial Aneurysms
What are the symptoms of a Cranial Aneurysm?
What are the non-surgical treatment options?
What are the surgical treatment options?
Recovery After Surgery
Aneurysms normally occur with minimal symptoms, sometimes patients are unaware that they have them because they don’t feel anything. If it is a bit larger, it can cause the sudden onset of a variety of symptoms like severe headaches, vomiting and nausea, difficulty seeing, and unconsciousness.
What makes aneurysms highly dangerous is rupturing. Larger aneurysms are more prone to bursting. About 1.3% of aneurysms rupture each year, coming up to about 27, 000 new cases of subarachnoid hemorrhage in the US. A ruptured aneurysm causes blood to get into the brain or its meninges, creating subarachnoid hemorrhage or intracranial hematoma and leading to a stroke. Excessive accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid (called hydrocephalus), spasm or narrowing of the blood vessels (called a vasospasm), or repeating aneurysms can also happen.
Some packages for yearly executive checkups have the option to include annual imaging to screen for aneurysms. However, the practice is not affordable. After the aneurysm has bled in 3 days, the chances that it will burst again become very low. The risk of an aneurysm bursting again returns to the same level 6 weeks after it first burst.
The Hunt and Hess scale is used to test the severity of a subarachnoid hemorrhage, based on the symptoms experienced. Grade 1 means that the patient is experiencing no symptoms, or only a minor headache or some stiffness in the neck. In Grade 2, the headache is stronger; there is a definite stiff neck, and cranial nerve palsy.
Grade 3 means the person gets drowsy and there’s some neurologic deficit. Symptoms of stupor, moderate to severe hemiparesis (weakness of one side of the body), some early decerebrate rigidity and vegetative disturbances lead to a Grade 4 rating. Grade 5 means the patient has entered a deep coma, has decerebrate rigidity and is near death. A person who becomes brain dead after an attack of subarachnoid hemorrhage gets a rating of Grade 6.
Another way to rate the severity of subarachnoid hemorrhage is by how it appears on a CT scan, using the Fisher Grade classification system. Grade 1 means there is no appearance of a hemorrhage; Grade 2 is a hemorrhage less than 1 mm thick; in Grade 3 the hemorrhage is over 1 mm thick; while Grade 4 means a hemorrhage of any thickness has intra-ventricular hemorrhage or parenchymal extension.
A ruptured aneurysm can result in varying prognosis, based on the location of the aneurysm, its size, the patient’s age, neurological condition, and general health. Some may die due to internal bleeding while others get better easily.
The classification of severity and the sufferer’s age are two of the most important factors in determining recovery. Those who have a Grade 1 or 2 based on the Hunt and Hess classification may recover easily with no permanent disability, provided they are a bit younger. Those who are older and score a higher Hunt and Hess grade upon hospital admission generally have a poor prognosis. Permanent disability, poor recovery, or death may be expected in about two thirds of all patients.