Letter by Charidimou et al Regarding Article, “Blood Pressure Reduction, Decreased Diffusion on MRI, and Outcomes After Intracerebral Hemorrhage”

Abstract

To the Editor: We read with interest the article by Garg et al,1 who found restricted diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) lesions in 39 of 96 (41%) of patients who had presented to a single center over about 4 years with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). They report that DWI lesions were related to the extent of blood pressure (BP) reduction from the admission BP and also correlated with a higher risk of dependence or death at 3 months, after correcting for ICH severity. This work confirms that areas of restricted diffusion, presumably reflecting acute ischemia, are common in the setting of acute ICH: such lesions have been reported with a frequency of 13% by Gregoire et al2 and 22.9% by Prabhakaran et al.3 However, the characteristics of the cohort studied and the differences in these results compared with those from the other …