Inside our body, there are thousands of blood vessels that have its own function. When one of them has a problem, it can affect the entire body system. You will feel not well and uncomfortable. The external iliac artery is also no exception. In fact, this is one of the important blood vessels for your health.
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What is the External iliac artery?
The external iliac artery is the branch of blood vessels that come from the common iliac artery. The common iliac artery itself is the big split of the main aorta that runs through your pelvis. This blood vessel then split into two, which is an internal iliac artery that runs to the inner side of your thigh, and the external that run to the outer side.
External iliac artery also can be called as the lower limb artery. The main reasons are this artery mainly supplies the blood and energy for this part of your body. And, in order to be able to do that functionality, this artery produces two important blood vessel branches for your lower limb, which is an inferior epigastric artery and deep circumflex artery.
This important blood vessel can become the source of many health problems and discomfort for anyone. Below, we have two main problems that can cause severe damage, if you don’t treat it as soon as possible and carefully.
External iliac artery Occlusion
We also can call this disease as the external iliac artery blockage. However, in most cases, the blockage doesn’t occur in the external iliac artery. But, it occurs in the main aortic vessel. Therefore, the official name of this disease is an
Just like its name, basically, this disease occurs when there is some the substance that piled up in the main aortic vessel. Therefore, the blood flow won’t be as smooth as before, when the substance didn’t pile up in there. This condition causes the amount of blood that runs to and through the external iliac artery decrease. The result is your lower body limb doesn’t receive enough blood supply which makes you feel numb and weak.
Mostly, this problem occurs in people over the age of 65 years old. However, the percentage of the occurrence can be said as low, which is only 12%-20%. The main cause of this problem in this age range is mostly the decreasing of the blood vessel wall flexibility. If it happens to younger people, mostly it’s caused by their unhealthy lifestyle.
There are three types of treatments that are usually used for this problem, which is medical treatment, surgery, and endovascular reconstruction. All of these treatments have two main goals. First of all is to reduce the risk of stroke, or any health problem caused by the vascular event. The other one is to improve the patient condition and eliminate the symptoms of the disease.
External iliac artery Endofibrosis (EIAE)
This is another dangerous disease that can attack your external iliac artery. The cause is still unknown and now is still being researched. However, by looking at the patient that suffer this disease, which mostly are athletes or someone who does a lot of physical activity, we can say that it happens because of the extreme physical activity.
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The treatment for this problem is using balloon angioplasty to reduce the occurrence of the symptoms, which mostly is a pain in the leg. If necessary, the endofibrosectomy and autologous saphenous vein closure patch surgery are also applied.
Basically, those are two problems that can happen to the external iliac artery. It is important to check your health regularly. So, if you feel any symptoms or something wrong with your body, you can get the treatment right away.
