Intravenous thrombolysis for pure pontine infarcts caused by cardiac myxoma: a case report and literature review.

Purpose: Cardiac myxoma (CM) is a rare but important cause of ischemic stroke, and typically involves the middle cerebral artery and rarely affects the brainstem only. The safety and efficacy of intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) for CM-related acute cerebral embolism are not clear.

Methods

We report a case of a 55-year-old woman who suffered a CM-related acute cerebral embolism presented with pure pontine infarcts and achieved a favorable prognosis by IVT with urokinase. We summarized the clinical data of this entity and performed a literature review of 21 previous reports of patients with CM-related acute cerebral embolism who were treated with IVT.

Results

In combination with previous reports, we found that the majority of patients (81.8%) obtained improvements in symptoms after IVT, including 63.6% in remarkable clinical improvement. The total rate of IVT-induced intracerebral hemorrhage was 22.7% and all occurred within 36 h, including hemorrhagic infarction type 1 (4.5%) and parenchymal hematoma type 2 (18.2%). Most of the cases had relatively good outcomes and no case died due to IVT.

Conclusion

Taken together, our findings support the use of IVT as an effective and safe tool for the ultra-early treatment of CM-related acute phase ischemic stroke.