[Postmortem study of the cerebral vascular system by the method of vascular casts in patients with ischemic cerebral...

The method of vascular casts was used for investigation of the cerebral vessels in subjects with atherosclerosis. The studied material comprised 35 brains taken from patients aged 70-85 years who died after strokes and 5 brains of patients aged 21-30 years who died after traffic accidents as a control group. It was found that small vessels in the atherosclerotic brains were tortuous and had numerous narrowings, they appeared elongated, and their course differed from that in young subjects. The casting method provided oval-shaped impressions of endothelial cell nuclei which could not have been visualized so clearly with the previously used histological methods.