Small focal cerebral ischemic changes caused by hypertension and tandem atherostenosis of the cerebral arteries

Abstract

Postmortem studies are of great importance in evaluating the effectiveness of clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive measures aimed at combating a social disease, such as dyscirculatory encephalopathy, the leading causes of which are hypertension and atherosclerosis. The complexity of these studies is largely determined by a variety of brain changes with the frequent concurrence of hypertension and severe cerebral atherosclerosis and, at the same time, the similarity of some changes, for example, the localization and size of hypertensive and atherosclerotic lacunar infarcts. The paper describes a case of dyscirculatory encephalopathy with multiple small focal cerebral ischemic changes caused by both hypertension and athero-stenosis of several arteries in both the brain carotid systems and the vertebrobasilar system, namely tandem stenoses. It has been established that small infarcts in tandem stenosis can result from adaptive processes in the intracranial arteries. These infarcts have some features of localization, such as the areas of adjacent blood supply to the cerebral hemispheres and cerebellum, as well as the deep regions of the brainstem. It is shown that arterial pathological changes in the ischemic zones permit one to make a differential diagnosis of hypertensive lacunar infarcts and the same infarcts arising in tandem stenoses. In addition, among the typological signs of hypertensive lacunar infarcts, there are enlarged perivascular spaces in the peri-infarct region and ischemic destruction of myelin in the periventricular regions of the brain.