Cerebral Atherosclerosis and Coronary Calcification

To the Editor: We read with great interest the article by Vliegenthart et al1 concerning an association between stroke and coronary calcification. It is of interest whether coronary calcification is correlated with cerebral atherosclerosis. We also believe that coronary calcification could play a crucial role in the incidence of cerebral infarctions. We would like to show a possible relationship between coronary calcification and cerebral atherosclerosis and then we would like to compare their study and ours. At the PL Tokyo Health Care Center, 31 646 Japanese subjects (19 901 men and 11 745 women) received physical checkups between April 1, 2001, and March 31, 2002. Among them, brain checkup and helical CT of the chest were done in 1100 subjects (865 men, 245 women). Mean age was 53.8 years (SD, 10.9 years), 54.0 years (SD, 10.8 years) in men and 53.1 years (SD, 11.2 years) in women. Brain MRI and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) were produced by a 1.5-Tesla superconducting system (Stratis II, Hitachi Medical Co). Axial T1-weighted (repetition time/echo time=400/20 ms) and T2-weighted (repetition time/echo time=4750/120 ms) images were performed on MRI. The slice/gap thickness of the MRI was 6.0/0.5 mm, and the matrix size was 224×256. The number of acquisitions was 2. MRA was applied by 3-dimensional time-of-flight technique. The slice thickness was 0.6 mm, and the matrix size was 140×140. Helical CT was used with CT-W3000 (Hitachi Medical Co). The slice thickness was 5 to 10 mm, and …