Spontaneous vertebral artery dissection with multiple supratentorial and infratentorial acute infarcts in the posterior circulation Case report

The article represents a case of a young patient with atypical clinical and paraclinical presentation of vertebral artery dissection by multiple cerebral infarcts, localized at the supratentorial and infratentorial levels in the posterior circulation. A case of a 21-year-old man, without a history of trauma in the cervical area or at the cranial level, without recent chiropractic maneuvers or practicing a sport, which required rapid, extreme, rotational movements of the neck, was examined. He presented to the emergency room with nausea, numbness of the left limbs, dysarthria, and incoordination of walking, with multiple objective signs at the neurological examination, which revealed right vertebral artery subacute dissection after the paraclinical investigations. The case was particular due to the atypical debut symptomatology, through the installation of the clinical picture in stages, during 4 hours and by multiple infarcts through the artery-to-artery embolic mechanism in the posterior cerebral territory. Abbreviations: PICA = posterior inferior cerebellar artery, CT = computed tomography, MRI = magnetic resonance imaging, angio MRI = mangnetic resonance angiography, FLAIR = fluid attenuated inversion recovery, FS = fat suppression, ADC = apparent diffusion coefficient, DWI = diffusion weighted imaging, T1/ T2 = T1/ T2 weighted image-basic pulse sequences in MRI, VA = vertebral artery, 3D-TOF = 3D Time of Flight