Non-invasive markers of vascular disease: An opportunity for early diagnosis of cognitive impairment

In this issue of Atherosclerosis, Crespo-Cuevas et al. studied the usefulness of two non-invasive markers of vascular disease - cervico-cerebral stenosis (CCS) and middle cerebral artery pulsatility index (MCA-PI)- in the prediction of long-term cognitive impairment [ [1] Crespo-Cuevas A.M. Canento T. Hernández-Perez M. et al. The Barcelona-Asymptomatic Intracranial Atherosclerosis (AsIA) study: subclinical cervico-cerebral stenosis and middle cerebral artery pulsatility index as predictors of long-term incident cognitive impairment. Atherosclerosis. 2020; 3 (025) Google Scholar ]. Cognitive decline has became one of the major threats to global health due to the increase in life expectancy in developed countries, which is expected to raise the number of dementia cases up to 80 millions in 2040 [ [2] Rizzi L. Rosset I. Roriz-Cruz M. Global epidemiology of dementia: alzheimer's and vascular types. BioMed Res. Int. 2014; 908915: 25 Google Scholar ]. Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) are the most common causes of dementia, with a prevalence of 4.4% and 1.6% in individuals older than 65, respectively [ [3] Lobo A. Launer L.J. Fratiglioni L. et al. Prevalence of dementia and major subtypes in Europe: a collaborative study of population-based cohorts. Neurologic Diseases in the Elderly Research Group, Neurology. 2000; 54: S4-S9 Crossref PubMed Google Scholar ]. Of note, both causes of cognitive impairment tend to coexist and mixed forms of dementia (AD and vascular) are considered to be an important and often under-diagnosed etiology of cognitive impairment [ [4] Schneider J.A. Arvanitakis Z. Bang W. et al. Mixed brain pathologies account for most dementia cases in community-dwelling older persons. Neurology. 2007; 69: 2197-2204 Crossref PubMed Scopus (1072) Google Scholar ]. The Barcelona-Asymptomatic Intracranial Atherosclerosis (AsIA) study: Subclinical cervico-cerebral stenosis and middle cerebral artery pulsatility index as predictors of long-term incident cognitive impairmentAtherosclerosisVol. 312PreviewWe aimed to study subclinical non-invasive vascular markers as predictors of incident long-term cognitive impairment in a longitudinal population-based study. Full-Text PDF