How fast does the thoracic aorta grow?
Calculation of growth rate of the aorta is more complicated than simply subtracting the original size of the aorta from the current size and dividing by the length of follow-up. Different modalities such as computed tomography (CT) scan, echocardiography, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may give different values. There may be interobserver variability in size assessment. And most importantly some scans may show smaller size than original measurements. (This does not imply that the aorta gets smaller but rather that there is variability in size measurement especially in huge samples of data.) If these negative changes are truncated, falsely high growth rates result. By means of specifically designed statistical methods developed to account for these potential sources of error, our team has found that the aneurysmal thoracic aorta grows on average at 0.10 cm per year. The descending aorta grows faster than the ascending aorta at 0.19 versus 0.07 cm per year. Also the larger the aort
