ABSTRACT
The early enthusiasm for endovascular repair of abdominal aortic aneurysm has been tempered by sobering reports of aneurysm rapture (1). The purpose of operating on abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is to prevent rupture. We must not lose sight of this fact by becoming distracted with surrogate endpoints such as endoleak. The term endoleak was first coined in 1998 by White and colleagues (2,3) to describe “a condition associated with endoluminal vascular grafts, defined by the presence of blood flow outside the lumen of the endoluminal graft, but within an aneurysm sac or an adjacent vascular segment being treated by the graft.”
