New-onset lesions on MRI-DWI and cerebral blood flow changes on 3D-pCASL after carotid artery stenting

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the new-onset hyperintense lesions on diffusion-weighted images (DWI) and the changes of cerebral blood flow (CBF) before and after carotid artery stenting (CAS) in patients with symptomatic unilateral carotid artery stenosis. Twenty-four patients with symptomatic unilateral carotid stenosis (50-99%) were enrolled. Routine head magnetic resonance imaging and three-dimensional pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling were taken 7 days before the surgery and for four consecutive days post CAS. While the incidence of new DWI lesions were high (17/24, 70.8%) and 176 lesions were observed among the 17 cases, there was only one subject showing the symptoms. The majority of the lesions were located at the cortex/subcortex of the ipsilateral frontal and parietal lobes (60.8%) with 92.6% of the lesions size being less than 3 mm. The CBFs in this area were significantly higher than that of the temporal lobe on the first 3 days post stenting (p < 0.05). No periprocedural CBF differences were observed between the two groups, however, the micro-embolism group presented decreased relative CBF in frontal and parietal lobes prior to stenting compared with the non-embolism group. The systolic blood pressure in the micro-embolism group at discharge was significantly lower than that at admission. The high incidence rate of micro-embolism in patients receiving CAS may not be the result of direct changes of hemodynamics in the brain but rather the loss of CBF regulation due to long-term hypoperfusion prior to the stenting.