ABSTRACT
Complications from endovascular repair of thoracic aneurysms can result from patient-related anatomy or device design issues. Complications can arise at the time of device delivery and placement, or during follow-up. Currently, no endoluminal graft (ELG) has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration to treat thoracic aortic disease. However, several devices exist in different stages of development. The AneuRx (Medtronic AVE, Santa Rosa, California), Vanguard
(Boston Scientific, Natick, Massachusetts), and Corvita(Boston Scientific, Natick, Massachusetts) thoracic ELGs have been in trials but development of these devices has stopped (1,2). Three devices currently under investigation in the United States and commercially available in Europe include the Thoracic Excluder (W.L. Gore, Flagstaff, Arizona), Talent Thoracic (Medtronic AVE, Santa Rosa, California), and Cook Thoracic endograft (Cook, Bloomington, Indiana). Prior to initiation of trials with the aforementioned devices, many thoracic aneurysms were repaired with homemade devices, similar to that originally described by Dake (3-5). In the absence of published results from multicenter trials, defining and understanding complications from endovascular treatment of thoracic aortic aneurysm repair is relegated to review of individual reported series.
