Local Symptoms and Recanalization in Spontaneous Carotid Artery Dissection

Abstract

To the Editor: We congratulate Nedeltchev and coworkers for their meritorious report1 on recanalization of spontaneous internal carotid artery dissection. The strengths of this work are a fairly large patient population compared with most previous reports and the repeated ultrasound examinations of the vasculature at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months. Recanalization always occurred within 6 months, but not later. We, having similar experience, currently repeat vascular imaging only at 6 months. Nedeltchev et al discuss that they did not detect any beneficial effect of complete recanalization and refer to 2 articles that do not directly support their view; of these, one is a small study on 60 cervical artery dissection patients treated with anticoagulants2 and the second3 is a review in Spanish …