View clinical trials related to Symptomatic Carotid Stenosis.
Filter by:Carotid Disease causes 10% of strokes. The Investigators are attempting to investigate the use of Transcranial Doppler to see if this is and effective, efficient, and/or valid way to identify individuals at highest risk for thromboembolic events from carotid disease. The plan is to plot the number of high intensity transient transcranial doppler signals with the category of patient (asymptomatic, symptomatic, and actively symptomatic) and evaluate if a relationship exists. The Investigators hypothesize that a linear relationship exists in that the higher the number of HITS the more symptomatic the patient. If results demonstrate the numbers of HITS correlate with the severity of disease this could potentially identify asymptomatic patients having subclinical symptoms who would benefit from a more urgent surgical intervention versus the current standard of care of elective intervention.
The impact on cardiovascular events achieved by statin therapy seems to be mostly attributable to the cholesterol-lowering effect with a highly debated contribution of the lipid-independent pleiotropic effects. However, a short-term benefit has been documented for patients treated with statins in acute coronary syndromes and other clinical settings. These observations strengthened the hypothesis of additional, so-called pleiotropic actions of statins. The investigators therefore sought to investigate how different lipid-lowering strategies (non-statin therapy, low-dose statin and high-dose statin) affects cellular composition of carotid plaque over a short-term period of three months. Specifically the investigators tried and dissect the LDL-C lowering impact on plaque cellular composition as compared to the lipid-independent contribution on plaque macrophage and smooth muscle cells.