MedWire News: Cerebral microbleeds (MBs) are an independent risk factor for the development of symptomatic cerebrovascular disease, Japanese researchers have shown.

Their study, which appears in the journal Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery, suggests that patients who are found to have MBs on brain imaging may benefit from primary prevention strategies to lower the risk for stroke.

The research was undertaken by Tetsuya Ueba (Kishiwada City Hospital, Osaka, Japan) and team and included 698 patients with no history of symptomatic cerebrovascular disease. The participants underwent gradient-echo T2*-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and were followed-up for 3.5 years.

The prevalence of cerebral MBs at baseline was 17.0%, Ueba’s team reports. Patients with MBs tended to be older, male, and have a higher prevalence of hypertension and antiplatelet/anticoagulant use than those without MBs.

During follow-up 36 patients experienced a first-ever cerebrovascular event, including 10 cerebral infarctions and 26 intracerebral hemorrhages.

After adjusting for age, gender, hypertension, and antithrombotic therapy, the presence of MBs at baseline was associated with a significant 2.64-fold increased risk for cerebrovascular events.

Further analysis according to stroke subtype indicated that MBs were significantly associated with ischemic but not hemorrhagic stroke, with hazard ratios of 11.77 and 2.11, respectively.

Ueba et al say that their study is the first to demonstrate a significant independent association between cerebral MBs and future cerebral infarction and call for their findings to be confirmed in future studies.

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