Silent stroke in patients with acute thrombotic stroke

: Introduction: Brain stroke is the most common neurologic disorder and also the most common cause of mortality and morbidity in neurtologic patients. Thanks to new methods of radiography such as MRI, brain vascular lesions including silent stroke are demonstrated more carefully. This study considers the frequency of silent stroke in patients with acute thrombotic stroke in Rafsanjan by using MRI. Methods: This was a descriptive cross-sectional study with convenience sampling on 106 patients with acute thrombotic stroke. For all patients (without history of stroke) MRI was done and suspicious cases of hemorrhage were eliminated. For the remainder EKG, echocardiography, EKG-Monitoring and cardiovascular consultation was performed and cases with emboli and previous stroke were eliminated too. Then a questionnaire consisting of demographic data and risk factors was accomplished and statistically analysed with SPSS 11.5 software. Results: 65.1% of patients with acute thrombotic stroke were female and 34.9% of them were male. The following data were obtained: 31 patients (29.2%) with silent stroke, 55.7% with history of hypertension, 35.8% with diabetes, 17% with history of hyperlipidemia, 12.3% with history of cigarette smoking, 4.7% with history of using OCP, 19.8% with history of addiction and 31.1% with history of heart disease. The most common area of acute thrombotic stroke was parietal lobe with the frequency of 27.4%. The most common area of silent stroke were parietal lobe and cerebellum, both of them with the frequency of 22.6%. Conclusion: High frequency of acute thrombotic stroke and silent stroke shows that silent stroke can be a risk factor for acute thrombotic stroke.