About 300.000 Americans have such tangles in their brains or spinal cords, but only 12 % of them have the symptoms like headaches and seizures. National Institutes of Health says that 3.000 deaths annually are caused by arteriovenous malformation.
Everyone is born with arteries and veins twisted, but that doesn't make sense in earlier years. The tangles grow during the years and become more twisted. This causes headaches for grown ups, and the tangles may burst.
Some minor bursts can not cause much difficulties, but if the quantity of bursts grow, brain starts bleeding and it is a real catastrophe.
Senator Tim Johnson's brain symptoms bothered him so much, that he went to hospital in late night. Doctors monitored him and informed that a surgical operation is needed. Now they say that arteriovenous malformation is stabilized. But this doesn't mean much, because doctors should wait for to Johnson to wake up and answer the questions. Only at that time it will be clear how much his brain is damaged.
"Still, he has a while that he'll be in an ICU but he has every chance of recovery," said Dr. William Bank, who treats AVMs and other neurovascular disorders at Washington Hospital Center. "It probably is not over," Bank added. "For a complete removal of an AVM, you need to be doing your surgery under ideal circumstances, not when the defect is actively bleeding"Â.
Conventional brain surgery can't remove AVM entirely, if the tangles are deep in the brain or if they're surrounded with other tangles. In these cases doctors use catheters to reach those deep tangles. This is called endovascular embolization.
By Ruzan Harutyunyan for HULIQ
Posted December 15th, 2006 by ruzik_tuzik
