Article Sidebar
Published:
Jul 16, 2014Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
The radiological appearance of intracranial aneurysms in adults infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
Abstract
Objectives: To describe the radiological appearance of intracranial aneurysms in HIV positive adults.
Method: In this retrospective analysis of data, 23 HIV-positive patients, of which 15 (65.2%) were female, with a total of 41 aneurysms were included. The mean age was 38 years, and their median CD4 count was 305 x 106/L. Inclusion criteria comprised subarachnoid haemorrhage and confirmed intracranial aneurysms on four-vessel angiography.
Results: Fifteen (65.2%) patients had a single aneurysm, of which 12 (80.0%) had a saccular appearance. Seven (46.7%) of the single aneurysms had a neck width larger than 50% of the transverse aneurysm sac size. The mean longitudinal diameter of the aneurysm sac was 4.9 mm and the transverse diameter 4.4 mm. More than half of these aneurysms occurred at the anterior communicating artery. The median CD4 count of single-aneurysm patients was 319 x 106/L. Eight patients (34.8%) had multiple aneurysms, with a total of 26 aneurysms (range 2–6 aneurysms per patient), of which 13 (50.0%) had a complex appearance. Twenty four
(92.3%) of the multiple aneurysms had a neck width larger than 50% of the transverse aneurysm sac size. The mean longitudinal diameter of the aneurysm sac was 4.0 mm and the transverse diameter 3.9 mm. The multiple aneurysms occurred more commonly in the internal carotid artery. These patients had a median CD4 count of 294 x 106/L.
Conclusion: HIV-associated intracranial aneurysms occur at a younger age, appear to be saccular and complex in shape, with a wide neck, and might rupture at small sizes.
