Advanced treatment for aneurysm is minimally invasive and avoids surgery
PATIENTS IN Munster can now be treated for potentially life-threatening cerebral aneurysms without having to travel to Dublin. This is because surgeons at Cork University Hospital (CUP) have begun treating those suffering from the condition with a new minimally invasive technique.
It is estimated that as many as 80,000 people will develop a cerebral aneurysm - a potentially life-threatening bulge in an artery in the brain - in the course of their lifetime and that every year in the Republic, some 350 people suffer from ruptured brain aneurysms.
More than 30 per cent of patients die within 24 hours of the bleed and a further 25-30 per cent will die within four weeks without some form of intervention, which, until the 1990s, meant neurosurgeons placing a metal clip across the neck of the ruptured aneurysms to prevent further bleeding.
More recently, a technique called coiling has been developed which involves navigating a catheter through the patient's arteries into the aneurysm, using X-ray guidance, and then introducing platinum coils through the catheter and folding them one by one into the aneurysm to prevent it bleeding.
Consultant neuroradiologist at CUH, Dr Noel Fanning, explained that until now this coiling treatment was only available at the National Neurosciences Centre for Ireland at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, but in the past two weeks doctors at CUH have begun using the procedure to treat patients.
"The introduction of coiling in CUH is a major service development as it will allow more timely treatment of patients with brain aneurysms. Patients will no longer have to travel to Dublin and the treatment will avoid patients requiring brain surgery," said Dr Fanning.
Dr Fanning said the neurosurgery team at CUH expects, given that it is a neuroscience centre for the southern region with a population base of around 1.2 million, to perform around 50 aneurysm coiling treatments per year at the hospital.
He said that in 2002 a landmark trial, the International Subarachnoid Aneurysm Trial (ISAT), demonstrated that coiling produced better outcomes for patients suffering from ruptured brain aneurysms than an operation to clip the aneurysm.
"While it is important to make clear that there will be some patients for whom surgery is still the most appropriate treatment, coiling should be suitable for seven out of 10 people who suffer a subarachnoid haemorrhage from an aneurysm," he said.