When surgeons at Blackpool Victoria Hospital in England opened a 72-year-old woman's ascending aorta to replace her failing aortic valve, they found its inner lining was blue. The patient had eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis, or EGPA, a rare inflammatory disease of blood vessels once known as Churg-Strauss syndrome.
The case, published this month in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports, is unusual on two fronts. EGPA typically attacks small and medium-sized blood vessels, so involvement of a large vessel like the aorta is considered exceedingly rare. And the authors could find no earlier report of this blue discoloration in a patient with the disease.
