 Hi and welcome to nursing school explained in this video on aneurysms. Now aneurysms can occur in any kind of blood vessel, but the most serious ones that we usually hear about are ones that occur either in the brain, so cerebral aneurysms or in the aorta, whether that's the thoracic or the abdominal aorta. And an aneurysm in general, what that term means, it's a permanent and localized outpouching or dilation of a blood vessel. So I've drawn out some graphs here so that you can kind of see what that means. Normally in a blood vessel, the blood flow just goes straight through as indicated in red here. When that blood vessel wall becomes turns into an aneurysm, then there are two different forms, which is what's called a fusiform aneurysm, where the vessel wall becomes weakened and then it kind of forms this outpouching here. And then when the blood flows through, it doesn't go straight anymore. It kind of gets a little bit more turbulent here. Or the other type of aneurysm is a secular aneurysm, where the blood vessel wall kind of builds this sac-like protrusion here that then again causes the blood flow to go through and become more turbulent. What happens then because there is so much pressure because of this turbulence, that the intima of the innermost layer of that blood vessel can become torn. And recall that there are several different layers that make an artery. And so when that gets torn, the vessel wall here becomes weaker and weaker. And then eventually, this could actually burst. And then the blood would basically just come out of that blood vessel, which is also called a dissection or an erupture, which of course can be life-threatening.