From the associated 9 hospitals, acute ischemic stroke patients were asked to be enrolled in the J-BAD Registry and classified into the lenticulostriate arterial (LSA) infarction (n = 124) and the pontine penetrating arterial (PPA) infarction (n = 42) groups. The clinical courses and the repeated magnetic resonance imaging findings were investigated.
Neurologic worsening was observed at a significantly higher rate in BAD compared with the LI patients in both the LSA and PPA groups (P < .01, 45.1% versus 22.6% and 46.7% versus 0%, respectively). In the LSA group, the enlargement of the ischemic lesion was significantly more frequent in BAD compared with the LI patients (P < .01, 66.2% and 34.0%, respectively). There was a significant relation between the enlargement of the lesion and the worsening of neurologic deficits (P < .001). Moreover, the clinical features, which predict the lesion enlargement, were BAD and older age.
LSA infarction of BAD diagnosis or older age patients might show an increase of lesion size and a tendency of neurologic worsening. It could be important to discriminate BAD from other ischemic stroke subtypes, in regard to the prediction of prognosis.