Relationship between size and location of infarction beside lateral ventricle and motor recovery following rehabilitation.

BACKGROUND: The lesions besides lateral ventricle and motor recovery following rehabilitation have hardly been studied. OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship between the size, location of infarction beside the lateral ventricle and motor recovery following rehabilitation. METHODS: A prospective cohort of 55 patients submitted to a Rehabilitation Medical Center between January 2015 and June 2019 who suffered a single cerebral infarction beside the lateral ventricle were included in the study. The size and distance between the posterior margin and the frontal-middle line (FML) of the lesion were measured. Follow-up was conducted until the recovery was no longer progressing. Barthel index and Brunstrom stages were used to evaluate the outcome (full recovery, partial recovery and poor recovery). Variance analysis and nonparametric test were used for the comparison between groups. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to screen the factors affecting the outcomes. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to compare the volume of infarction, behind the FML and the outcomes. RESULTS: Among the 55 patients, the outcome was full recovery (n = 28), partial recovery (n = 13) and poor recovery (n = 14). Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that volume and location of the infarction were significantly correlated with the outcome (p = 0.039, 0.050). The lesion volume in the full recovery patients was significantly smaller than that in the poor recovery patients (p < 0.01). The posterior edge of the lesion in the full recovery patients behind the FML was statistically significant compared with that in the poor recovery patients (p < 0.01). Spearman correlation analysis showed that the motor recovery was negative correlation to lesion volume (r = -0.508, P < 0.01) and location (r = -0.450, P < 0.01) of the infarction. CONCLUSION: The motor recovery of patients with cerebral infarction beside lateral ventricle is related to the volume and location of the lesion. The larger the volume of the lesion, and the farther the posterior margin of the lesion to the FML, the worse the motor recovery.

Atlantoaxial Misalignment Causes High Blood Pressure in Rats: A Novel Hypertension Model.

Atlantoaxial disorders are often correlated with hypertension in practice. In order to study the relationship between atlantoaxial disorder and hypertension, we attempted to construct an animal model. In this work, we presented an animal model where their atlantoaxial joints were misaligned. We investigated the changes of blood pressure before and after treatments of the modeled rats. We had the following results. (1) SBP and DBP of each surgery group were significantly higher than those of control and sham groups. (2) After the second operation (the fixture was removed), SBP and DBP of both surgery groups decreased and got closer to the control and sham groups after 7 days. (3) Heart rates got significantly higher in both surgery groups, compared to control and sham groups. (4) The blood Ach levels of the surgery groups were significantly lower than those of control and sham groups. With these results, we concluded that we successfully constructed cervical atlantoaxial disorder models in rats that showed hypertension symptom. However, the underlying mechanism connecting atlantoaxial disorder and hypertension still requires further study.