Incidental findings on brain magnetic resonance imaging: systematic review and meta-analysis

This article is very interesting. This review showed that the silent
brain infarction and white matter abnormality is the most common finding
among non neoplastic incidental findings. The prevalence was increase
according with the age. The advance of highly sensitive techniques for
brain imaging such as MRI can detect potentially abnormal findings. Such
findings include lesions with an appearance typical of infarction; when
these appear in persons without a history compatible with stroke. This
lesion was called "silent infarcts." The strong relationship of these
findings with age and other stroke risk factors suggests that they may
themselves be risk factors or even manifestations of clinically important
cerebrovascular disease. Many prior studies have focused on the rate of
silent infarcts in various disease states. Acute ischemic stroke patients
have been found to have unrelated, silent infarcts in 11% to 29%.Silent
brain infarction is also an important risk factors for further stroke and
dementia. Previous study showed that global cognitive function was
significantly worse in participants with silent brain infarcts on the base
-line MRI than in those without such infarcts. Appropriate control of
vascular risk factors should be performed.

Competing interests:
None declared