cognitive decline and underlying mechanisms in symptomatic intracranial artery stenosis patients: a cohort study

Conditions: Intracranial Atherosclerosis; Cognitive Impairment; Cerebrovascular Event

Summary: the purpose of this study is to explore the mechanism of cognitive impairment in patients with symptomatic intracranial atherosclerotic stenosis (icas), and further plans to explore the impact of different treatment options on cognitive function in symptomatic icas patients.

all participants underwent a medical evaluation that included routine laboratory studies before and after 3-month and 1-year follow-up. upon meeting the inclusion criteria and providing informed consent, each participant will complete a battery measure of neuropsychological tests, blood sample collection, and magnetic resonance imaging scan after enrollment and after 3-month and 1-year follow-up. about 100 participants were included in this study. a series of neuropsychological tests were obtained by a trained investigator to assess. the tests include the evaluation of global cognitive function and multiple individual cognitive domains. the various tasks and questionnaires to measure cognition function including montreal cognitive assessment (moca), mini mental state examination (mmse), chinese auditory verbal learning test (cavlt), digital span test (dst), , stroop color test (stroop test), color trail test (ctt), clock drawing test (cdt), verbal fluency test (vft), etc., at the same time, the investigators also pay attention to the evaluation of participants' emotions by hamilton anxiety scale (hama), hamilton depression scale (hamd). furthermore, the memory and the occurrence of cerebrovascular events as the primary outcome measure, this study focused on the multidimensional cognitive function and cerebrovascular events of patients with symptomatic icas. blood sample will be collected for biological multiomics research. the patients will receive a magnetic resonance imaging scan in multi-modalities. after 3-month and 1-year follow-up, the participants will be interviewed to obtain the same assessments, blood sample and magnetic resonance imaging scan in multi-modalities as before.

Eligibility criteria:
inclusion criteria: 1. non-illiterates, no symptoms and signs of central nervous system dysfunction, head ct or head mri showed normal cerebral parenchyma or old lacunar cerebral infarction, and non-thalamus, frontal lobe, temporal lobe and other cognitively related infarction; 2. tcd\\cta\\mra\\dsa present intracranial artery stenosis (50% or more) or occlusion; 3. history of vascular-related tia and acute cerebral infarction (more than 2 weeks after lastest), and nihss score was less than or equivalent to 4 points at the time of enrollment; exclusion criteria: 1. history of stroke,transient ischemic attack,seizures or unexplained loss of consciousness. 2. organic brain defects on t1 or t2 images. 3. any history or clinical signs of other severe psychiatric illnesses (like major depression,psychosis or obsessive compulsive disorder). 4. implanted pacemaker,medication pump,vagal stimulator,deep brain stimulator. history of substance abuse within the last 6 months

Keywords: symptomatic intracranial atherosclerosis stenosis cognitive impairment cerebravascular event