Evaluation of Patients with Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to point out the etiology, risk factors, the rate of recanalization and mortality of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis patients. MATERIAL and METHODS: The current study was planned as retrospectively and fifty patients were included. All the patients were analyzed according to the clinical presentation, etiologic causes, risk factors, presence of MR lesion, the involvement of anatomic localization, recanalization and mortality. RESULTS: The most frequent risk factors of the cases were prothrombotic conditions (34%), pregnancy (14%) and puerperium (8%). The most frequent involvement was transverse sinus and secondly more than one sinus thrombosis. As clinical application symptoms we detected headache (68%) and then focal neurologic deficiency (30%). On the other hand, at least 3 month’s incidence rate of recanalization in the patients was 70.7%. Except for 2 cases that ended with death, the mortality of the cases was low. We could not find a significant association between risk factors and the pre sence of cerebral MR lesion or not (p=0.42) and also the presence of recanalization or not in the follow-up MR venography (p=0.625). CONCLUSION: We have concluded that, in the diagnosis and follow-up of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, MR venography is the best method; through early diagnosis and proper treatment, the rate of recanalization will be fairly high and mortality will be low. In etiology, besides trombotic conditions, pregnancy and puerperium must be considered as one of the frequent risk factors.