Response to a letter regarding a paper entitled, 'post-intervention TCD examination may be useful to predict outcome in acute ischemic stroke patients with successful intra-arterial intervention'

摘要

We thank Dr. Dale Ding for his thoughtful comments regarding our previous study, entitled "Post-intervention TCD examination may be useful to predict outcome in acute ischemic stroke patients with successful intra-arterial (IA) intervention" [1]. He clearly presented the potential utility of the pulsatility index (PI) of the middle cerebral artery citing a recent study reported by Uzuner et al. [2]. As he pointed out, our study has a limitation regarding the definition of the poor outcome. Because our study was retrospective and limited to hospitali-zation records, we defined pQor outcomes as in-hospital death or decompressive craniectomy. Had we collected functional outcomes such as, modified Rankin Scale and Glasgow Outcome Scale, the impact of our study would have been more significant. However, we consider our definition of the poor outcome reasonable and justifiable because the major cause of death in patients with space-occupying infarcts is a transtentorial herniation due to fatal brain edema [3].