CBS News – Sara Adair knows the symptoms of aortic dissections. The hospital analyst’s father and sister each experienced the dangerous cardiac condition, when the inner lining of the body’s main artery tears and causes the aorta to come apart.
Aortic dissections can be deadly, and are hard to diagnose. Both Adair’s father and sister survived, but after her sister’s aortic dissection at the age of 49, Adair was determined to learn why it had happened.
She, her father and her sister were diagnosed with Loeys-Dietz syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects the body’s connective tissues.
Adair, a mother of two, learned the symptoms, saw a cardiologist and had regular scans of her aorta. There were no warning signs.
On July 22, 2024, she spent the afternoon attending sports tournaments and a pool party with her kids. It was just another day in a “super busy weekend,” she told CBS News, and she felt “completely normal.” When they finally got home at 9 p.m., she sat down to unwind.
“In the emergency room, a cardiology fellow was able to make the correct diagnosis. Dr. Shawn Chawla used a point-of-care ultrasound probe that plugs into an iPhone, turning the device into a portable ultrasound system. The scan showed the large tear in Adair’s aorta.”
“All of a sudden my chest started to hurt. It felt fine all day, completely normal, then just all of a sudden this crushing, horrible, chest pain I’d never felt before,” Adair said. “It was long enough for me to think ‘Oh, is this really what I think it is?'”
Sudden chest or back pain that moves into the neck is a key symptom of aortic dissection. It was exactly what had happened to Adair’s sister. It was a feeling she had been dreading.
“The pain moved up to to my neck, and then I was like, ‘Okay, this is it. This is serious,'” she said. “I got up to tell my husband to call 911, but I made it into the living room where he was and just collapsed on the floor” …
