Abstract
BACKGROUND: Abdominal aortic aneurysm is defined as a focal and persistent dilatation of the abdominal portion of the aorta to a diameter ≥50% larger than the diameter of adjacent segments and involving all three layers of the vessel wall. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate whether risk factors (diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidemia, smoking, and age) influence aneurysm expansion. METHODS: This is a retrospective observational study of a series of cases that included 299 patients treated from January 2007 to January 2020, separated into exposed and unexposed groups by risk factors. Student's t test was used to assess whether mean aneurysm diameters showed statistically relevant differences between groups. A multivariate regression analysis was also conducted with the same groups. RESULTS: Smokers had larger aneurysms than those who had never smoked (p=0.002) and than former smokers (p<0.01) and patients ≤65 years old had larger diameters compared to patients aged 66 to 75 years old (p=0.0226). There were no significant correlations with the other risk factors (diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, hypertension). Multivariate regression analysis confirmed the same result, but with a coefficient of determination of 0.0608. Furthermore, smokers, patients with hypertension, patients with dyslipidemia, and patients without diabetes had higher frequencies of much larger aneurysm diameters. CONCLUSIONS: It was observed that age ≤65 years and current smoking were related to greater aneurysm diameter. In contrast, the same statistical relationship was not observed for hypertension, absence of diabetes, or dyslipidemia, since there was a greater frequency of discrepant values for these groups. Studies are needed with a more comprehensive analysis of determinants of aneurysm diameter.