Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
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Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) is standard care for patients suffering from an ischemic stroke due to a large vessel occlusion. Immediate and follow-up transcranial ultrasound examinations after MT were shown to have a diagnostic benefit. However, it is unclear whether repeated extracranial ultrasound after MT has an additional diagnostic yield, that is, depicts new findings. ⋯ Although sonographic normalization of pathologic findings was observed, pathologic new findings were not detected during follow-up. This study provides first data for a discussion of the role of ultrasound in a structured stroke care after MT. However, larger studies are required to improve the understanding.
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Autonomic dysfunction is common in transthyretin familial amyloid polyneuropathy (TTR-FAP). Because ultrasonography is a powerful tool to study peripheral neuropathy, vagus nerve (VN) ultrasonography was used in our study to investigate the possible changes of the dimension of VN in TTR-FAP. ⋯ VN enlargement is prevalent among TTR-FAP patients. VN ultrasonography may be an important clinical tool for assessing the severity of autonomic dysfunction in TTR-FAP.
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Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a sexual dimorphism in brain health, with women exhibiting greater disability following strokes of comparable size and having a higher prevalence of cognitive impairment later in life. Despite the critical implication of the cerebrovascular architecture in brain perfusion and brain health, it remains unclear whether structural differences in vessel density exist across the sexes. ⋯ While this research remains exploratory, it raises important pathophysiological considerations for brain health, adverse cerebrovascular events, and dementia across the sexes. Our findings also highlight the need to take into account sex differences when investigating cerebral characteristics in humans.
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MRI has a crucial role in presurgical evaluation of drug-resistant focal epilepsy patients. Whether and how much 7T MRI further improves presurgical diagnosis compared to standard of care 3T MRI remains to be established. We investigate the added value 7T MRI offers in surgical candidates with remaining clinical uncertainty after 3T MRI. ⋯ 7T MRI detected new lesions in over a third of 3T MRI nonlesional patients, confirmed and better characterized a 3T suspected lesion in one third of patients, and helped exclude a 3T suspected lesion in the remainder. Our initial experience suggests that 7T MRI adds value to surgical planning by improving detection and characterization of suspected brain lesions in drug-resistant focal epilepsy patients.
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Transient global amnesia (TGA) is a rare neurological disorder causing a transient disturbance of episodic long-term memory. Its etiology remains yet to be identified; the only consistently reported findings in patients with TGA are small hyperintense lesions in the hippocampus on diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI). The aim of this study was to define whether these lesions are subfield specific, as suggested previously. ⋯ Contrasting previous assumptions, we found DWI hyperintense lesions not to be restricted to the CA1 subfield. The visualization of focal hippocampal lesions on diffusion imaging located to several different hippocampal subfields suggests a potential pathophysiology of TGA independent of microstructural hippocampal anatomy and subfield-specific vulnerability.