Gas emboli are a clinical issue often encountered in the space exploration, marine construction, and medical fields. Individuals involved with these disciplines will often have asympomatic gas emboli circulating throughout their bodies on a regular basis. A study into the impact of chronic asymptomatic gas emboli on the risk of atherosclerosis in humans is thus presented. This research utilized...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Hypertension is commonly considered the major cause of lacunar infarctions. However, in some cases, it has been suggested that lacunes could be caused by cerebral emboli from cardiac or carotid sources. Cholesterol cerebral emboli have been rarely reported as a cause of lacunes. CASE DESCRIPTION We describe a 79-year-old patient with a progressive multi-infarct dementia...

Eighty-five patients with retinal emboli, visible ophthalmoscopically, were studied retrospectively. All the patients had presented with transient or permanent visual loss. Follow up from the time of presentation was one year to 12 years with a mean of 4.5 years. Life expectancy in the 58 medically treated patients who presented with cholesterol emboli was significantly reduced (p = 0.028). Str...

The lumbosacral spinal cords of 28 patients with atheromatous emboli to abdominal viscera and/or grafts to the abdominal aorta were examined by serial sections. In 12 patients, atheromatous emboli were found in spinal arteries, most commonly in the sacral cord, and most frequently in the anterior spinal artery. The general absence of spinal cord infarctions was attributed to the nature of the e...

Gaseous emboli may be introduced into the bypass circuit both from the surgical field and during perfusionist interventions. While circuits provide good protection against massive air embolism, they do not remove gaseous microemboli (GME) from the bypass circuit. The purpose of this preliminary study is to assess the incidence of GME during bypass surgery and determine if increased GME counts w...

Air embolization to the coronary arteries is a common cause of myocardial ischemia during open heart surgery. Carbon dioxide emboli may be absorbed faster than air emboli. In this randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial, we determined that flooding the surgical field with carbon dioxide is associated with improved myocardial function assessed by transesophageal echocardiography. Fort...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Transcranial Doppler (TCD) can detect high-intensity transient signals (HITS) in the cerebral circulation. HITS may correspond to artifacts or solid or gaseous emboli. The aim of this study was to develop an offline automated Doppler system allowing the classification of HITS. METHODS We studied 600 HITS in vivo, including 200 artifacts from normal subjects, 200 solid e...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Anterior cerebral artery (ACA) emboli may occur before or during fibrinolytic revascularization of middle cerebral artery (MCA) and internal carotid artery (ICA) T occlusions. We sought to determine the incidence and effect of baseline and new embolic ACA occlusions in the Interventional Management of Stroke (IMS) studies. MATERIALS AND METHODS Case report forms, pretre...

PURPOSE To describe the 10-year incidence of retinal emboli, the associated risk factors, and the relationship of retinal emboli to stroke and ischemic heart disease mortality. METHODS The Beaver Dam Eye Study (n = 4,926) is a population-based study of persons 43 to 86 years of age. Retinal emboli were detected at baseline (1988-1990) and at a 5-year (1993-1995) and a 10-year (1998-2000) foll...

enterococci are normal inhabitants of gastrointestinal tract, being responsible for 5 to 18% of infective endocarditis and the incidence appears to be increasing. eleven patients with enterococcal endocarditis were studied. in a case series group, 10 men (average 57 years) and one woman (37 years) were studied. two patients had rheumatic heart disease, 5 patients arteriosclerotic disease and on...