The characteristics and comparison between young and old patients with spontaneous isolated celiac artery dissection:...

Though increasing studies reported the management of spontaneous isolated celiac artery dissection (ICAD), the characteristics and etiology of ICAD in different age-stage patients have not been well-studied. Our study was designed to describe and further to compare the clinical features of spontaneous ICAD between young and old patients.

We searched PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science up to March 1, 2023 for spontaneous ICAD case reports. Two reviewers screened the titles and abstracts of searched records for qualified reports according to the including and excluding criteria and extracted the data independently. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS software (version 19.0; IBM Corp, Armonk, NY) and Stata 12.0 (Stata Corp., College Station, TX). Descriptive results were presented as the mean ± standard deviation or percent. The comparison results between young and old patients were displayed as risk ratio (RR) or standardized mean difference (SMD) with its 95% confidence intervals (CI).

We totally identified 60 reports in the present analysis. The mean age of patients was 52.4 years, with the majority of patients being male (84.4%). The majority of patients were symptomatic and commonest presentation was abdominal pain (76.7%). Most patients (63.2%) had comorbidities or history and hypertension and smoking were the top 2 conditions with proportion of 63.3% and 40.5% respectively. When comparing young to old patients with ICAD, no significant difference was found in demographic and clinical features including sex, comorbidities/history, and symptoms. However, we found that young patients with ICAD experienced significantly longer dissection length (SMD 1.01, 95% CI 0.16-1.86; P = .015) and distance from ostium (SMD 0.96, 95% CI 0.07-1.85; P = .013), but no significant difference was observed in true lumen compression (SMD -0.39, 95% CI -1.22-0.44; P = .364). In addition, our results showed that ICAD in young patients extending more to distal arteries, including common hepatic artery/hepatic artery (RR 2.04, 95% CI 1.13-3.68; P = .01), splenic artery (RR 2.36, 95% CI 1.24-4.49; P = .017) and left gastric artery (RR 25.42; 95% CI 1.55-417.74; P = .04).

Though spontaneous ICAD had multitudinous clinic-pathologic features, it was apt to middle-aged males and symptomatic and abdominal pain was always the commonest presentation. Hypertension and smoking were the top 2 conditions of ICAD patients. There was significant difference between young and old patients in radiographic characteristics of ICAD which may lead to different treatment and outcomes.