April 12 (UPI) — Increases in the diameter of the thoracic aorta may be a sign of an impending heart attack or stroke, a study published Tuesday by the journal Radiology found.
As the diameter of the thoracic aorta — the part of the artery that passes through the chest carrying oxygenated blood to the heart — rises with increases in body weight, women have a 33% higher risk for death from heart attack, heart disease or stroke, the data showed.
Men, meanwhile, have a 20% higher risk for death from heart attack, heart disease or stroke as the diameter of their thoracic aorta increases, the researchers said.
In addition, increases in diameter of the thoracic aorta in women and men are associated with an up to 30% higher risk for death from any cause.
“Our results suggest that imaging-based assessment of diameter of thoracic aorta can be considered as a risk marker for future cardiovascular disease,” study co-author Dr. Maryam Kavousi said in a press release.
“As the aortic diameter is significantly related to body size, use of aortic diameters indexed for body measurements could improve its prognostic value for cardiovascular outcomes,” said Kavousi, an epidemiologist at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The part of the aorta that passes through the chest, the thoracic aorta, is divided into an ascending aorta that rises from the left ventricle of the heart and a descending aorta in the back of the chest.
The thoracic aorta typically grows with age, but changes in size and structure — a phenomenon known as vascular remodeling — can affect heart function and blood circulation, among other processes, which can lead to heart disease, research suggests.
For this study, Kavousi and her colleagues performed regular commuted tomography, or CT, scans on the thoracic aortas of 2,178 adults in the Netherlands over an average of nine years.
Thoracic aorta diameters were evaluated along with participants’ body mass index, or BMI, which measures a person’s weight in conjunction with their height.
Higher increases in thoracic aortic diameter, in parallel with rises in BMI, were associated with increases in the risk for death from heart attack or stroke in both women and men, the data showed.
Remodeling of the aging aorta appears to differ between women and men, with faster deterioration in the former.
The findings indicate that cardiovascular risk assessment based on thoracic aorta size could lead to effective prevention strategies, the researchers said.
Thoracic aorta size assessment could easily be added to existing screening methods, as the cardiac CT scans used in this study are already commonly used to assess coronary calcium, they said.
Thoracic aorta diameter could also be measured routinely, for example as part of CT-based lung cancer screening, according to the researchers.
“This provides an exciting and unique opportunity to study sex-specific risk profiles and patterns of growth in thoracic aorta in the general population,” Kavousi said.
“Aging could affect aortic health and structure more adversely in women than in men,” she said.
