Computed tomography patterns of intracranial infarcts in a Ghanaian tertiary facility

• DOI: 10.4314/gmj.v56i1.5
• Publication Date: 2022-04-13T07:08:24Z
• Authors: Emmanuel K. M. Edzie; Klenam Dzefi-Tettey; Philip N. Gorleku; Edmund K. Brakohiapa; Peter Appiah-Thom...; Kwasi Agyen-Mensah; Michael K. Amedi; Frank Quarshie; Evans Boadi; Joshua M. Kpobi; Richard A. Edzie; Abdul R. Asemah
• Keywords: Male; Epidemiology and Management of Stroke; Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine; Retrospective cohort study; Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging; Epidemiology; Computed Tomography Angiography; Ghana; Brain Ischemia; 03 medical and health sciences; Computed Tomography; Diabetes mellitus; Magnetic resonance imaging; Endocrinology; 0302 clinical medicine; Health Sciences; Humans; Cardiac Imaging; Patterns; Computed tomography; Internal medicine; Aged; Ischemic Stroke; Retrospective Studies; Infarction Treatment; White matter; Brain; Middle Aged; Diagnosis and Treatment of Carotid Artery Disease; 3. Good health; Stroke; Cross-Sectional Studies; Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2; Advanced Cardiac Imaging Techniques and Diagnostics; Infarction; Cardiovascular Risk Assessment; Hypertension; Medicine; Original Article; Female; Intracranial Infarcts; Tomography, X-Ray Computed; Radiology

Objective: To determine the Computed Tomography (CT) patterns of intracranial infarctsDesign: A retrospective cross-sectional study.Setting: The CT scan unit of the Radiology Department, Cape Coast Teaching Hospital (CCTH), from February 2017 to February 2021Participants: One thousand, one hundred and twenty-five patients with non-contrast head CT scan diagnosis of is-chaemic strokes, consecutively selected over the study period without any exclusionsMain outcome measures: Patterns of non-contrast head CT scan of ischaemic strokes.Results: About 50.6% of the study participants were females with an average age of 62.59±13.91 years. Males were affected with ischaemic strokes earlier than females (p<0.001). The risk factors considered were, hyperlipidaemia (59.5%), hypertension (49.0%), Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM-2) (39.6%) and smoking (3.0%). The three commonest ischaemic stroke CT scan features were wedge-shaped hypodensity extending to the edge of the brain (62.8%), sulcal flattening/effacement (57.6%) and loss of grey-white matter differentiation (51.0%), which were all significantly as-sociated with hypertension. Small deep brain hypodensities, the rarest feature (2.2%), had no significant association with any of the risk factors considered in the study.Conclusion: Apart from the loss of grey-white matter differentiation, there was no significant association between the other CT scan features and sex. Generally, most of the risk factors and the CT scan features were significantly associated with increasing age.