Re:My Life After a Heart Attack at 38
by petercooper on Monday January 21, 2019 @10:28AM
(#18960956)
I am not a doctor, just someone who reads too many medical stories, but the thing that convinced me was an explanation by Henry Marsh, one of the UK's leading brain surgeons.
A brain aneurysm poses a certain level of risk based on its size and location. So let's say you have an asymptomatic aneurysm with an annual mortality risk of 0.5%.
Now let's say you decide to randomly have a full body MRI and the aneurysm is discovered. A neurosurgeon tells you that you can have an operation to clip or coil the aneurysm with a 10% risk of fatality due to its location. Do you have the op?
Apparently most people do, despite the overall odds of immediate death. A 0.5% annual risk of death would ride most people out to their age of natural death rather than the 10% risk of the op, but people hate having even a tiny risk hanging over their head long term.
As such, there's a school of thought that you shouldn't have such types of screening (or at least to not know the results if they are minor) unless you are symptomatic.
A brain aneurysm poses a certain level of risk based on its size and location. So let's say you have an asymptomatic aneurysm with an annual mortality risk of 0.5%.
Now let's say you decide to randomly have a full body MRI and the aneurysm is discovered. A neurosurgeon tells you that you can have an operation to clip or coil the aneurysm with a 10% risk of fatality due to its location. Do you have the op?
Apparently most people do, despite the overall odds of immediate death. A 0.5% annual risk of death would ride most people out to their age of natural death rather than the 10% risk of the op, but people hate having even a tiny risk hanging over their head long term.
As such, there's a school of thought that you shouldn't have such types of screening (or at least to not know the results if they are minor) unless you are symptomatic.