Angiographic findings in Wallenberg's lateral medullary syndrome.

Abstract

T HIS report concerns 7 cases of Wallenberg's lateral medullary syndrome studied by vertebral angiography. Krayenbiihl 4 and Krayenbtthl and Ya~argil s in two reports mentioned that they have studied 12 cases but actually 5 cases were reported, 3 in their first publication and ~ in the second (several were not clinically lateral medullary syndromes). They found partial or complete occlusion of the vertebral ar tery at the arch of the atlas as the characteristic angiographic picture for this clinical syndrome. There are other scattered reports of angiographic studies done in cases of the lateral medullary syndrome usually as part of a large series of vertebral angiograms but, as far as we know, KrayenbUhl and Ya~argil's is the largest series reported previously. An excellent demonstration of the pathologic findings in this syndrome has been given by Fisher et al. 3 Those authors found occlusion of the vertebral ar tery in 7 of 16 pathologically proven cases, occlusion of the vertebral and the posterior inferior cerebellar arteries in 5, occlusion of the posterior inferior cerebellar ar tery alone in r and in ~ cases no vascular occlusion was found. In those cases in which just occlusion of the vertebral ar tery was present, small branches of tha t ar tery had supplied the infarcted lateral medullary area and the posterior inferior cerebellar ar tery was absent or not involved in the