Cerebrale microbloedingen en cognitieve disfunctie: causale rol of uiting van onderliggend vaatlijden?

Study results recently published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine show a relationship between cerebral microbleeds and the cognitive functioning of elderly patients with cerebral small vessel disease. Contrary to those results, I believe this relationship is based on underlying vasculopathy rather than microbleeds as causative factor of cognitive dysfunction in this group. Furthermore, although the authors propose taking microbleeds into account in the evaluation of elderly patients with cognitive dysfunction suffering from cerebral small vessel disease, the search for microbleeds in a patient with cerebral small vessel disease on brain MR suspected of having (vascular) cognitive dysfunction has neither therapeutic nor diagnostic value in clinical practice to date.

Conflict of interest: none declared. Financial support: none declared.