Clinical courses and treatment of splenic artery aneurysms--report of 3 cases and review of literatures in Japan.
We have treated three cases of splenic artery aneurysms recently, so we reported them with a review of 181 cases in Japan. All three cases are women and have characteristic clinical courses and pathogenesis in each to which we performed a reasonable operation so that they could be saved. First one is a ruptured case. So we performed ligation of the splenic artery from inside the aneurysm under 9 min.'s clamp of the aorta. Second one was pointed out the splenic artery aneurysm during admission for cholecystectomy, so we performed splenectomy and aneurysmectomy, and after that we reconstructed the splenic artery with end-to-end anastomosis. Third one suffered from splenomegaly and portal hypertension. We performed splenectomy with the aneurysm. From the clinical and pathological findings, we concluded that an aneurysm in our first case was associated with arterial dysplasia, second with hemodynamic changes in parous women, and third with portal hypertension. Aneurysms of the splenic artery have been rarely reported until recently, when developments in diagnostic procedures made their discovery easier. We have diagnosed splenic artery aneurysm in three patients preoperatively. The clinical symptoms and operative procedure was different in each case, and are reported here. We demonstrated the summary of our three cases of that at Table 1.