Jonathan D. Santoro

Overall, these results stands in contrast of our usual instinct of wanting to treat a patient with symptomatic ICAS with best medical management first and only consider angioplasty as a second option after a patient has failed the best medical management, and suggests that overall benefit noted in the BASIS trial was strongest amongst patients who's presenting with their first stroke or TIA in the territory of the qualifying artery.

In a separate paper in this issue of the journal on the topic of Moyamoya syndrome, we have an original article by Dr. Jonathan Santoro from Children's Hospital in Los Angeles and colleagues with the results of a multi-center retrospective cohort study looking at how Moyamoya syndrome shows up differently in kids with Down syndrome than those without.

In this study, they compared 77 children with Down syndrome-associated Moyamoya to 121 kids who had Moyamoya without Down syndrome.

The two groups were similar in age, with the median age at presentation of about 7.6 years in the Down syndrome group and 7.3 years in the non-Down syndrome group.