Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) – relevance for mechanisms of cerebral hemorrhage – analysis of 24 MRI evaluated patients

Abstract Introduction. The new MRI techniques introduced in the last decade allowed the detection of cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) in different groups of diseases: stroke, Alzheimer disease, vascular dementia or healthy people of advanced age. CMBs are radiologically defined as small, rounded, homogeneous, hypointense lesions on T2*-weighed gradient-recalled echo (T2*-GRE) sequences. Objective and Method. We evaluated the prevalence, number and location of CBMs in a cohort of 26 consecutive cerebral hemorrhage patients admitted in the National Institute of Neurology and Neurovascular Diseases. We also assessed the association between CMB, classical vascular risk factors and small vessel disease. Results and Conclusions. From the 26 patients, 2 patients had secondary intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) (hemorrhage in metastasis, respectively a cavernoma). From the 24 ICH patients 12 have had at least 1 CMB lesion. The average volume of the cerebral hemorrhage was larger in patients with CMBs, with a relative increase of 42%. Small vessel disease was associated with a significant increase in the presence of CMBs (relative increase of 86%). In both cases, however, since the number of patients enrolled was small, the correlations did not reach statistical significance.