Assessment of vascular injury in patients with stroke by measurement of pulse wave velocity.

Vascular injury causes various diseases and may be especially important as a risk factor for stroke, and early diagnosis is useful for prevention of stroke. Recently, pulse wave velocity (PWV) has been receiving increasing attention as a noninvasive measurement of vascular injury. In this study, we investigated PWV of patients with stroke to determine the degree of vascular injury. PWV was measured in 114 patients with stroke, and the significance of differences between the PWV of stroke subgroups and that of the control group was investigated in an age- and sex-matched case-control study. In comparison with the control group, PWV was increased significantly in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (P = .0107) and cerebral infarction (P < .0001). Of risk factors, hypertension and high PWV were independently related to the presence of intracerebral hemorrhage on multivariate analyses. Smoking and high PWV were found to be independent risk factors for cerebral infarction. A strong relationship between stroke and PWV was demonstrated. Measurement of PWV is useful for quantitatively assessing the progression of vascular injury, which may potentially be a risk factor for stroke.