Objective: Brain atrophy is associated with an increased mortality rate in elderly trauma patients and in patients treated with mechanical thrombectomy for acute ischaemic stroke. In the setting of ischaemic stroke, the association between brain atrophy and death is stronger than that of sarcopenia. It has previously been shown that lower masseter area, as a marker of sarcopenia, is linked to lower survival after carotid endarterectomy (CEA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Brain atrophy is associated with an inferior functional outcome in patients undergoing mechanical thrombectomy (MT) for acute ischemic stroke. We hypothesized that brain atrophy determined from pre-interventional non-contrast-enhanced CT scans would also be linked to increased mortality in this cohort.
Methods: A total of 204 patients treated with MT for acute occlusions of the internal carotid artery (ICA) or the M1 segment of the middle cerebral artery (M1) at Tampere University Hospital, Finland between 2013 and 2017 were retrospectively studied.