Symptomatic plaque enhancement is associated with early-onset post-stroke depression.

Background: The association between imaging features closely associated with symptomatic intracranial atherosclerotic plaques and early-onset post-stroke depression (PSD) is currently unclear.

Materials And Methods: 76 ischemic stroke patients who underwent high-resolution vessel wall magnetic resonance imaging (HR-VWI) were divided into PSD and non-PSD groups according to their DSM-V diagnoses and HAMD-17 scores at 14 days after onset. Clinical data and the imaging features associated with symptomatic plaques (including the enhancement index (EI), remodeling index, and plaque surface irregularity) were compared between groups. Multifactorial logistic regression analysis was used to find independent predictors of early-onset PSD. Spearman rank correlation analysis explores the association between clinical data, symptomatic plaque imaging features, and HAMD-17 in patients.

Results: The sample comprised 36 patients with early-onset PSD. The symptomatic plaque EI and infarct volume were significantly higher in depressed patients than in patients without depression (P < 0.05). Multivariate logistic regression showed that symptomatic plaque EI could be used as an independent predictor of early-onset PSD after correcting for the confounding factor of infarct volume (OR = 1.034, 95% CI:1.014-1.055, P = 0.001). In the total sample, symptomatic plaque EI, infarct volume, and HAMD-17 had a significant positive correlation with each other (P < 0.05).

Limitations: This study focused only on the patients' symptomatic plaques and did not monitor patients' systemic inflammation levels at the time of HR-VWI.

Conclusions: The degree of symptomatic plaque enhancement is an independent predictive imaging marker of early-onset PSD and can be used the early diagnosis of early-onset PSD.