A study Influence of atherosclerosis risk factors on carotid artery wall thickness

W. -S. Kim,H. -T. Jeong,J. H. Hwang,Y. K. Park,G. -Y. Noh,H. -M. Choi,J. -H. Bae

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-36841-0_398

Abstract

The severity of carotid intima-media thickness (IMT), which is the sum of intima thickness (IT) and media thickness (MT), is an independent predictor of transient cerebral ischemia, stroke, and coronary events such as myocardial infarction. Evaluation of carotid IMT using ultrasonography is a validated quantitative method for assessing atherosclerosis, which is closely correlated with pathological findings observed in the carotid artery. However, the individual clinical significance of each layer of carotid artery has not been well studied. We intended to measure the IT, MT, and the IMT of carotid artery separately and tried to analyze the clinical significance. Two hundred and fifty consecutive patients (125 males, 125 females) underwent carotid artery scanning using high-resolution ultrasound. The images were off-line analyzed using B-mode ultrasound image processing, devised in our research. We measured the IT, MT, and IMT semi-automatically at the far wall of designated 1cm length of the right common carotid and calculated the average values over the 200 points. The IT (p < 0.05), MT (p < 0.05) as well as IMT (p < 0.01) of patients with atherosclerotic disease were significantly thicker than that of the patients without atherosclerotic disease. Patients with hypertension showed significantly thicker IT (p < 0.05), MT (p < 0.01), and IMT (p < 0.01) than that of the patients without hypertension. However, only IT was thicker in patients with smoking (p<0.05) than that of the patients without smoking. Smoking was associated only with intima while hypertension was associated with the all three layer’s thickness. This result suggests the atherosclerotic process can be different by cardiovascular risk factors. Therefore, clinical study with specific risk factors such as hypertension or smoking as in our study needs to focus on specific layer of vessel wall. Key words: Carotid artery, Intima thickness (IT), Media thickness (MT), Intima-media thickness (IMT), Ultrasound

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