Endovascular treatment of brain aneurysms

Abstract

Brain aneurysms are the most frequent cause of intracranial hemorrhage in young people. In the last 40 years the treatment of brain aneurysm has been revolutionized by the advent and the growth of endovascular techniques. The introduction of detachable balloons by Serbinenko in the mid-1970s to occlude ruptured or symptomatic aneurysms was the first step of the neurovascular progress that goes on today. In the early 1990s detachable coils with the aid of the balloon remodeling technique before and of self-expanding stents later were the following steps of this path. Nowadays these techniques are well established, safe, effective, and usually used all over the world, helping to secure ruptured aneurysms and to prevent bleeding by unruptured lesions. The recent advent of flow-diverter stents represents the latest improvement, pretending to obtain in most of the cases not only the exclusion of the aneurysm from the flowing blood but also its complete disappearance.