Assessment of Ischemic Heart Disease in Patients with Stroke Using Myocardial Perfusion SPECT: Preliminary report

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to investigate cardiac events and ischemic heart disease in patients with stroke. The patients were studied by myocardial perfusion SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) and evaluated the functional outcome after rehabilitation. METHOD: Subjects were 31 patients with stroke who had myocardial perfusion SPECT for abnormal findings on the electrocardiography. There were eighteen patients with ischemic stroke 12 patients with hemorrhagic stroke; and one patient with both ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. We screened the patients for the hypertension, diabetes mellitus, previous history of stroke, smoking, alcohol use, and hyperlipidemia as risk factors of ischemic stroke and ischemic heart disease. For the dichotomous classification of positive or negative myocardial perfusion SPECT, reversible and persistent defects were considered as positive. We investigated the functional outcomes on the admission and discharge using the Modified Rankin scale (MRS) and functional independence measure (FIM) scores. Cardiac events in patients with stroke were investigated. RESULTS: The myocardial perfusion SPECT was positive in 10 of 18 patients (55.6%) with ischemic stroke. Four out of ten patients with ischemic stroke had cardiac events. Positive myocardial perfusion SPECT was significantly associated with cardiac events (p0.05). CONCLUSION: The results of our study suggested that myocardial perfusion SPECT is useful in the screening of silent ischemic heart disease in patients with ischemic stroke and to assess future cardiac events of them.