Recently, there has been a lot of speculation about the passing away of an employee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences due to a clinically induced aneurysm during pregnancy. The general public does not know much about this disease, and this incident has made the viciousness of this disease known to the public. In fact, we in vascular surgery have been battling with this sinister disease! In 2001, Zhu Gang, a famous Chinese men’s volleyball player of his generation, was admitted to a local hospital with sudden chest pains during training, and was transferred to a famous hospital because of his critical condition. After 12 hours of surgery, the volleyball player’s life could not be saved. The following afternoon, 30-year-old Zhu Gang left his fans who loved him dearly. Coincidentally, in the 1980s, Hyman, the famous attacker of the American women’s volleyball team, who was famous with Lang Ping in China, also died suddenly due to the same cause, leading to the untimely death of Zhu Gang and Hyman, the culprits of the two volleyball greats, was a laminated aneurysm. What is a coarctation aneurysm? The peak age of onset is 45-60 years old, but in recent years there has been a trend toward younger patients. The aorta is the thickest artery in the body. After extending from the heart, it is called the thoracic aorta in the chest and the abdominal aorta when it reaches the abdomen. There are three layers of aortic vessels, just like our clothes have a lining, a face, and a middle layer. Normally it should be a tight fit of the three layers, but various pathological factors damage the lining of the arterial vessel, causing a split that allows blood to penetrate into the middle layer and keep peeling off the middle layer while the true vessel lumen is deflated, which forms a sandwich aneurysm. The tear in the middle layer obstructs the blood supply to some important organs (heart, brain, cremaster, liver, kidney, limbs, etc.) branches. Aortic coarctation aneurysms can be considered a critical emergency in vascular medicine because they can be life-threatening at any time if the vessel wall is damaged and ruptures. In fact, what we call “aneurysm” is not an entity. If the original aortic lumen is called the true lumen, the lumen formed in the middle is the pseudolumen. Because the false lumen is filled with blood, the false lumen looks like a “sandwich” in the aortic wall, and the artery dilates to a certain degree in an “aneurysm-like” manner, which is why it is called a “sandwich aneurysm”. This is why it is called a “coarctation aneurysm”. Causes of clogged aneurysms: The main causes of clogged aneurysms are hypertension, infectious diseases such as syphilitic aortitis, endocarditis, dermatologic lupus erythematosus, injury, and congenital cardiovascular disorders. Among them, hypertensive patients account for more than 80% of thoracic aortic coarctation aneurysms. This is because hypertension is mainly manifested as increased blood pressure in the body circulation, i.e., increased impact of blood on the arterial wall, resulting in damage to the aorta. The main cause of Hyman’s entrapment aneurysm is Marfan’s syndrome, which objectively promotes the formation and rupture of entrapment aneurysms due to prolonged and intense training and competition that brings about prolonged blood pressure increases. The main cause of the aneurysm was severe gestational hypertension. Symptoms of a coarctation aneurysm: Most patients experience sudden onset of severe pain in the chest or abdomen and an increase in blood pressure at the acute onset of an aortic coarctation aneurysm; the pain is tear-like, intense and often unbearable. The pain is tear-like, severe, and often unbearable. It is often accompanied by profuse sweating, and some patients may even go into shock due to the pain. Sudden chest pain is often misdiagnosed as myocardial infarction, and ECG and CT are needed for diagnosis and differentiation. Generally, there is an acute phase and a chronic phase of a coarctation aneurysm, and 70% die within two weeks if the attack is sudden. If the acute phase can be changed to chronic phase, the chest and back pain can gradually disappear or turn into vague pain after a few days. Treatment of entrapment aneurysm: Because the drug treatment of entrapment aneurysm nowadays is mainly antihypertensive treatment, which may only reduce the further development of entrapment tear, there is no better drug treatment. Therefore, surgical treatment is generally adopted. In the case of the beginning or the whole entrapment aneurysm, artificial blood vessel replacement is required; in the case of the entrapment aneurysm below the descending aorta, patients can be treated with a stent-type artificial blood vessel placed through the lumen of the blood vessel, in which a new inner layer is lined at the cracked area of the blood vessel to seal up the breach, and the blood vessel wall will gradually heal when the natural repair process in the body works. Nowadays, the treatment technology is more mature and steps can be taken to achieve a good outcome for a clogged aneurysm if it is detected in time. The majority of patients treated with endoluminal isolation have achieved satisfactory results and their lives have been preserved. Prevention of clogged aneurysms: How to prevent them? The main thing is to pay attention to the usual lifestyle; patients with hypertension should control their blood pressure, and if they have aortic sclerosis, they should lower their blood lipids. People with congenital diseases should pay attention to self-protection and active treatment, avoid strenuous exercise to avoid rupture and actively treat the original disease. More than half of the patients die from rupture and hemorrhage during the acute stage of the disease, so it is often called an “untimely bomb” in the human body.