Thoracic aortic dissection can present with minimal symptoms for prolonged periods, requiring high clinical suspicion to avoid misdiagnosis.
Aortic dissection may present with minimal symptoms for months; this case leaves open the spectrum of painless variants pending larger studies.
Thoracic aortic dissection is a rare, but lethal, medical condition that is either misdiagnosed as a myocardial infarction or overlooked completely. Though thoracic aortic dissections are commonly diagnosed in patients exhibiting sharp chest pain, there are some notable cases where patients do not report the expected severity of pain. We report a unique case of a patient with a thoracic aortic dissection who was initially nearly asymptomatic for eight months, in order to heighten awareness, highlight diagnosis protocol, and improve prognosis for this commonly misdiagnosed, but fatal, condition.
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Kumar et al. (2016) studied this question.
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