A 81-year-old woman had mild fever, hypersedimentation and occasional left-sided temporal headache. The temporal artery is located with a doppler stethoscope. After a superficial incision with a lancet, blunt dissection with scissors is used to expose the artery. The artery is typically tortuous and weakly pulsatile. The artery is lifted with a blunt instrument, and both ends are tied using resorbable sutures. The removed section of the artery is fixed with formaldehyde. In this patient the histology was normal.
Temporal artery biopsy