Death rates and rupture rates due to abdominal aortic aneurysms are not always the same

In a commendable study, Abdulameer et  al1 report on mortality by ruptured aortic aneurysms (rAAs) in the United States between 1999 and 2016. The main criticism of this study is that the terms death rate and rupture rate are used interchangeably as being the same. Evidently, death rate is the appropriate term and does not include the patients surviving a rupture. Perhaps these two terms were similar during the earlier study period of open repair. However, their difference becomes greater in the study's recent years, when endovascular aneurysm repair for rupture is increasingly used with significantly lower mortality.
Source: Journal of Vascular Surgery - Category: Surgery Authors: Tags: Letter to the Editor Source Type: research