Blood volume flow and sonagram disturbance in diseased common carotid arteries: one year follow-up.

Abstract

A pulsed Doppler velocimeter with an adjustable range gated time system and a double transducer probe has been used to measure velocity and volume flow in follow-up studies of 100 patients with extra-cranial cerebro-vascular disease. The patient material was subgrouped according to whether the disease involved the carotid or vertebral arteries unilaterally or bilaterally. The results showed an unexpected and unexplained trend towards an improvement in mean volume blood flow in the common carotid arteries over the course of 1 year except in those patients who initially presented with four vessel disease in whom there was a trend towards deterioration. In contrast to this spectral analysis of the blood velocity flow showed evidence of deterioration with an increase in flow disturbance and damping. This deterioration was observed either in the vessel originally found with disease or by involvement of an additional vessel showing evidence of disease at the time of follow-up. The deterioration in sonagram appearance was statistically significant in the two and four vessel disease groups (0.025 greater than P greater than 0.01) the remaining two groups showed a similar trend towards deterioration but the numbers of patients in these two groups was probably too small to attain statistical significance.