What is an aneurysm in the brain?

A brain aneurysm is a weak spot in the artery in the brain. It can be located on any of the arteries that do supply the brain with its blood supply. That weak spot will tend to expand over time, and eventually can rupture if not treated.

The symptoms that would concern us for a brain aneurysm would be as follows. If somebody had the worst headache of their life, that is a clearly classic description of an aneurysm. It may have leaked or even bled. Again, these patients often times have had headaches, of course, in the past, but this would be something different. This would be, again, most people say the worst headache of your life. Often comes with nausea, vomiting. It can be sometimes related to even being comatose or knocking the person unconscious.

In addition to just the worst headache of your life, there are other subtle symptoms that can come along with a brain aneurysm that are a bit more rare, but need to be mentioned, which are everything from nerves not working quite right, meaning you have facial droop or you may have double vision, or any of the signs of classic stroke, where one side of the body's not working quite as well as the other side. In an aneurysm situation, that usually comes with also headache of some sort. If it's a stroke that is a low blood flow stroke, where an artery's been blocked and it's not supplying blood and they're having symptoms from it, headache is usually not associate with those. It's a little bit of a separator between a low blood flow stroke and a bleeding stroke. Headache is almost always associated with the bleeding strokes. Again, they tend to have some nausea and feeling sick to their stomach. It can be, again, associated with exertion. It may come with other nerve findings that are unusual, but all those should be taken seriously and get evaluated immediately.