Prevalence of Patent Foramen Ovale and Diagnostic Efficacy of Transcranial Doppler Sonography in Cryptogenic Ischemic Stroke Patients

The prevalence of patent foramen ovale (PFO) in healthy persons was estimated as about 10~25% and was up to 40% in patients with stroke. Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) was considered to be the most sensitive method to detect PFO and was used as the gold standard. Transcranial doppler sonography (TCD) of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) during a contrast (saline bubble) injection has recently been proposed as an alternative detecting method for PFO. In this study, we would like to know the difference between TCD value and TEE value in subjects with cryptogenic ischemic stroke. We performed TCD and TEE tests to detect PFO on 64 patients (30 women and 34 men, mean age was 59.4 years) with cryptogenic ischemic stroke. PFO prevalence through TCD was 45.3% (29 of 64 patients) and the prevalence through TEE was 34.4% (22 of 64 patients). There was no statistical significance between PFO test and TCD test (P=0.206). But TCD had a sensitivity of 90.9% (20 of 22 patients), specificity of 78.6% (33 of 42 patients), positive predictive value of 69.0% (20 of 29 patients), and negative predictive value of 94.3% (33 of 35 patients). We concluded that TCD was a highly sensitive method for detecting a right-left shunt. Therefore, the non-invasive TCD test is a method more effective than the anti-invasive TEE test in the cost and evaluation of the existence or nonexistence of right to left shunt in addition to the screening method of the cerebrovascular disorder. Considering these points, TCD test could be recommended for patients with cryptogenic ischemic stroke as a useful and convenient method for screening of the existence or nonexistence of a right to left shunt caused by PFO.