Case History: A 77-year-old man presents with fatigue and shortness of breath with minimal exertion. He is brought into the examination room in a wheelchair due to shortness of breath with ambulation. He has a history of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and coronary artery disease with prior stent to left anterior descending artery. Examination is notable for a harsh III/VI late-peaking systoli...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Unenhanced head CT has become the first line imaging study in the evaluation of suspected acute cerebral ischemia. It is important to identify subtle findings of acute ischemia on this exam to direct appropriate patient management. Summary of Case- We report the first case of multiple pial surface distal internal carotid artery territory calcified emboli causing multifoca...

Symptomatic common carotid artery (CCA) occlusion is an uncommon occurrence that may require surgical intervention. We aim to describe a case of CCA occlusion that presented with the unusual symptom of recurrent syncope. A 69-year-old lady presented with a history of recurrent syncopal episodes and amaurosis fugax associated with left leg weakness. She was found to have a right CCA occlusion on...

BACKGROUND Peripheral blood expansion of an unusual CD4+ T-cell subset lacking surface CD28 has been suggested to predispose rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients to develop more aggressive disease. However, the potential association between CD4+CD28null T cells and early atherosclerotic changes in RA has never been investigated. METHODS AND RESULTS The number of circulating CD4+CD28null cells w...

Major risk factors for coronary heart disease are also associated with early carotid artery thickening, but no studies have yet examined patterns of risk factors to see whether they differ for the two outcomes. Assuming similar pathogenesis for both coronary and carotid atherosclerosis, one could interpret risk factor pattern differences as relating to differences in staging, i.e., early athero...

The reported rate of detection of Chlamydia pneumoniae DNA within atherosclerotic lesions by PCR varies between 0 and 100%. In this study, identical sets of coded experimental atheroma samples (n = 15) and spiked controls (n = 5) were analyzed by 16 test methods in nine centers by means of PCR. The positive controls were correctly identified to levels of 1, 0.1, and 0.01 inclusion bodies of C. ...

We hypothesized that reactive carbonyls generated from smoke exposure cause increased arterial low-density lipoprotein (LDL) accumulation and endothelial layer permeability. In addition, we hypothesized that estrogen supplementation was protective against chronic environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure to the artery wall. Quantitative fluorescence microscopy was used to determine artery inju...

In the October 2009 issue of your journal, Thomas et al. [1] report the safety of off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCABG) in patients with left main disease (LMD). However, although they address in their introduction the fact that patients with LMD are at higher risk of having calcified ascending aortas (AAs), they do not discuss this issue any further. Heavily calcified aortic root r...

INTRODUCTION Atheroma of the facial artery is an extremely rare disease. CLINICAL FINDINGS/PATIENT CONCERNS Herein, we report an extremely rare case of an atheroma arising from the facial artery, mimicking a parotid gland tumor. DIAGNOSES The preoperative diagnosis was a right-sided parotid gland tumor. INTERVENTIONS We performed removal of the right parotid gland tumor, via a modified fa...

 Introduction: Prevalence of stroke following coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) is % 2.1-5.2 and associated with high mortality. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of carotid artery disease in patients undergoing CABG surgery.  Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in the years 2010-2011 on 192 patients who underwent open heart surgery (CABG) in...