Yale Center for Thoracic Aortic Disease

 

The Yale Center for Thoracic Aortic Disease is one of the first officially designated aortic centers and one of the largest institutions in the world for clinical care of patients with aneurysms. It is also one of the most active centers for basic science and clinical research in aortic diseases.

The Center provides comprehensive management for patients with an aneurysm or aortic dissection. Services offered include medical assessment, surgical treatment, screening of family members and monitoring of aneurysm activity.

The investigative clinical and scientific contributions to the study of thoracic aortic aneurysms are available in more than 75 publications on PubMed, the government resource for scientific medical publications.  

Dr. Elefteriades and his research team, in collaboration with Dr. Olga Iakubova and colleagues at Celera Genomics in California, have been conducting advanced research into the molecular genetics of thoracic aortic aneurysm disease. They have developed a 31-RNA gene chip that is 85% accurate in determining – from a blood test only – whether a patient harbors a thoracic aneurysm. It is hoped that, after further testing, this gene chip test may become a widely applied screening test, like the PSA test for prostate cancer.

The team has also recently identified DNA mutations that produce thoracic aortic aneurysm. An article and video on the gene test can be found at ScienCentral.com.