Influence of family history on abdominal aortic aneurysm wall strength

The probability of developing an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is greatly increased in individuals with a family history of this disease. The purpose of this work was to determine whether there are fundamental anomalies in the AAA wall integrity in these patients by comparing their AAA wall failure strength with that from patients without a known family history of the disease. A standard t-test was used to compare the group means. The mixed model multiple linear regression technique was also used to test if there is a difference in wall strength after adjusting age, gender, and AAA size. Both tests showed that there is a significant difference between the failure strength of the wall in these two groups. We conclude that there might be fundamental differences in AAA wall integrity between patients with and without a family history of AAA.