engleski

Intracranial vascular disease and post-stroke aphasia

Since stroke is frequently resulting from extracranial carotid artery disease as well as intracranial atherosclerosis, early noninvasive diagnostics of these atherosclerotic changes are indispensable in classification, prevention, prognosis and follow up of cerebrovascular disease and its consequences. The purpose of this study was to investigate the importance of TCD in determination of intracranial vascular disease causing the post-stroke aphasia. The insonation of the intracranial vessels was performed with Transcranial Doppler DWL Multi Dop XL with a 2 MHz sector transducer in 97 patients (60 female, mean age 72 years) with acute stroke and aphasia in the first 3 days after the onset of the symptoms. Extracranial imaging of the carotid arteries was performed with an Aloca 5500 Prosound with 7, 5 – MHz linear transducer. Each patient was evaluated by clinical examination, blood tests, brain CT scan and protocol determined by speech-language pathologist. TCD findings were highly compatible with etiology, anatomic location of lesions, aphasia type and motor disorders. Significant changes in cerebrovascular hemodynamics in the language areas of the brain were found. Classical aphasia syndromes are considered cerebral arterial occlusion syndromes and TCD as a method is important for the purpose of noninvasive assessment of cerebral hemodynamics and for the evaluation of intracranial cerebral vascular disease causing post stroke aphasia. TCD is not sensitive enough to detect changes in small cerebral arteries and it does not provide information about lesions located on the small branches of the MCA that are associated with the various types of aphasia in patients with stroke.

aphasia; stroke; transcranial doppler; intracranial vascular disease; cerebrovascular hemodynamics; language areas

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