Why are patients with acute stroke admitted to hospital?

The study indicates that in Huntington's chorea there may be reduced perfusion in the head of the caudate nucleus, and radiopharmaceuticals, including 99Tc HM-PAO, should be available commercially in the near future, and the imaging equipment, a tomographic gammacamera, is available in most hospitals.

Abstract

computed tomography2 but lacks the ability to provide a differential diagnosis.Recently interest has focused on radiopharmaceuticals which allow images to be made showing regional cerebral blood flow.Two agents in par- ticular have proved useful, '231 isopropylamphetamine (IMP)3 and, more recently, 99Tc hexamethyl propyleneamineoxime (HM-PAO).4These agents not only provide the ability to identify the presence of both tumours' and infarcts,6 although both appear as areas of reduced cerebral blood flow, but they also show distinctive patterns of perfusion for some types of dementia.78We have shown that, in particular, the pattern in Alzheimer's disease is ofa bilateral reduction in perfusion in the temporo- parieto-occipital regions while in multi-infarct dementia the uptake pattern varies from normal to that of gross focal defects.9Our recent work indicates that in Huntington's chorea there may be reduced perfusion in the head of the caudate nucleus.9'mTc HM-PAO, which offers several technical advantages over '23I IMP, should be available commercially in the near future, and the imaging equipment, a tomographic gammacamera, is avail- able in most hospitals.The study is simple to perform, requiring one intravenous injection of the radiopharmnaceutical and about 30 minutes' imagig tme.