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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 7|pp 9510—9521

Modified cerebral small vessel disease score is associated with vascular cognitive impairment after lacunar stroke

Nan Zhi1, Lei Zhang2, Yao Wang3, Shuwei Bai1, Jieli Geng1, Ling Yu1, Wenwei Cao1, Lei Zhuang1, Yan Zhou3, Yangtai Guan1
  • 1Department of Neurology, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
  • 2Laboratory of Genetics, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
  • 3Department of Radiology, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
* Equal contribution
Received: June 17, 2020Accepted: December 9, 2020Published: February 1, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202438

Copyright: © 2021 Zhi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

We conducted a cross-sectional study to characterize the relationship between total and modified small vessel disease (SVD) score with vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). Patients (n = 157) between the ages of 50 and 85 years old who had suffered their first lacunar infarction were analyzed prospectively. Brain magnetic resonance imaging was performed to identify SVD manifestations, which were used to calculate total or modified SVD scores. Neuropsychological assessments measured cognitive function. Spearman correlation analysis demonstrated that the total and modified SVD scores were associated with overall cognition as well as with function in the executive and visuospatial domains. The associations remained significant in linear regression after adjusting for age, sex, education and vascular risk factors. Binary logistic regression and chi-squared trend tests revealed that VCI risk increased significantly with SVD burden based on the modified SVD score. Subsequent chi-squared testing demonstrated that the VCI rate was significantly higher in patients with a modified SVD score of 5-6 than in patients without any SVD burden. Our results suggest that both the total and modified SVD scores show a negative association with cognitive function, but the modified SVD score may be better at identifying patients at high VCI risk.