BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE To assess 10-year incidence of retinal emboli and its predictors in an older population. METHODS Survivors of 3654 Blue Mountains Eye Study participants > or =49 years of age were re-examined 5 and 10 years later. Incident emboli were assessed from retinal photographs. RESULTS Cumulative 10-year incidence was 2.9% (95% CI, 2.1% to 3.6%) among 2361 at risk. Age was ass...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Inadvertent foreign body embolization is a rarely diagnosed and neglected complication of cerebral angiography that has not been studied systematically. METHODS We undertook a comprehensive 5-year retrospective study of all available postmortem cases of postangiographic neurologic complications, as well as a comprehensive histologic examination of all surgically resecte...

Background and Purpose: Asymptomatic retinal cholesterol emboli are sometimes encountered on ophthalmoscopic examination. They are associated with decreased survival, but their clinical significance is not fully known. We sought to determine which vascular risk factors are associated with such emboli. Methods: We studied 70 consecutive men (55-84 years old) with asymptomatic retinal cholesterol...

Quantification of pulmonary emboli has become important in assessing the results of thrombolytic therapy and in following the natural history of thromboemboli. This study evaluated angiography as a quantitative procedure by comparing sequential changes in emboli of known size and weight with alterations on angiograms. Twenty-four aged thrombi formed in vivo were embolized intact into 12 recipie...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Many reports in the medical literature have proposed methods of differentiating between gaseous and particulate emboli detected with the use of transcranial Doppler ultrasound. The purpose of this study was to compare the previously published methods with our own sample volume length (SVL) parameter to assess the accuracy of each method in classifying emboli. METHODS A ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE To assess the relationship between retinal arteriolar emboli and mortality in older people. METHODS Pooled data from 2 population-based cohort studies. At baseline, the Beaver Dam Eye Study (BDES) examined 4926 persons 43 to 86 years of age (1988 to 1990), and the Blue Mountains Eye Study (BMES) examined 3654 persons 49 to 97 years of age (1992 to 1994). Retinal arterio...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE This is a study of cardiac diseases associated with the 1,382 cases of first cerebral infarction in residents of Rochester, Minn., during 1960-1984. METHODS This is a population-based study in Rochester, Minn., for which the medical record-linkage system was used to identify cardiac disease among patients with first cerebral infarction. RESULTS There were 318 patients...

The authors undertook a randomised prospective study to investigate the contribution of thigh tourniquets to the formation of intra-operative venous emboli during lower limb surgery. Patients were randomised to have a thigh tourniquet or no tourniquet and transoesophageal echocardiography was used to detect embolic signals in the right heart during and after knee arthroscopy. Three physicians b...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Transcranial Doppler ultrasound can detect circulating cerebral emboli. Monitoring of patients with potential embolic sources may allow identification of high-risk patients who can then be selected for prophylactic treatment. However, practical patient monitoring will require automated programs that can detect emboli and differentiate them from artifact. METHODS A new o...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The use of Doppler ultrasound to detect arterial emboli has major implications for the classification and treatment of stroke. Experimental studies indicate that embolic materials produce different ultrasound signals, depending on their acoustic properties. To examine the possibility of characterizing emboli of different sources in the clinical setting, we compared the em...