Hi Emily,

I have heard of it before, but the way I understand it, it’s not common at all. One of our original members here, LisaH, had quite a rare case of MM located in the basilar territory. With her second surgery, she had both the direct and in-direct procedure performed at the same time for her rare case. (Different, huh?) Please forgive me for speaking for her, but she let me read her Angio report and I remember how fascinated, yet scared I was. I haven’t seen her post here in a while, but I know she’d help you if she could. I think her e-mail address is posted on her profile page. She could explain the exact details to you.

Hope that helps. Good Luck!

Mar

Hi Emily,

The way I understand it is, at the lower border (back of the brain) the two vertebral arteries join together to form the basilar artery or "vertebro-basilar artery", and before the basilar artery divides; several other arteries come from it and in Lisa’s case I believe it was the PCA (posterior cerebral artery) her P1 segment, the first branch from the top of the basilar on the left side that was occluded. According to the angio she had a lot of basilar moyamoya vessels. They decided to do the two different surgeries, right there on the spot; I don’t think Lisa even knew about it til she was out of surgery. So she can explain the why, what and where better than I can.

I’m not sure exactly where your occlusion is when you say vertebrobasilar arteries, but I know they told Lisa it was rare in her case.

Good luck with your surgery next month. You'll be in my thoughts and prayers!

Mar

Hi Emily,

My daughter Emmily is now 11.  She has a case where the vetebral arteries are also occluded.  Her body had already created its own bypass, the radiologist was amazed at what he saw on her arteriogram.  They actually found this in 2001 prior to her first surgery.  Dr. Scott performed surgery on the left side in Nov of 2001 and on the right side in Mar 2004.  He has talked to us about a third surgery to the back of the brain, but that he had only done it (at that point) two other times. (However he did say it was sucessful both times.  His hope was that she would develop enough blood flow from the first two surgeries to possibly eliminate the need for a third. 

Now she is really doing pretty well, she has become to have a few symptoms again, Headaches, left sided issues and short term memory losses.  We are having another MRI/MRA this Friday. 

From what Dr. Scott has told us this is pretty rare------ I hope this helps....  Please feel free to let me know if you have any more questions, I don't know if I can answer, but I will try.  We have been dealing with this since Emmily was 3 years old.   

Rox

Good Luck Emily,

I will be keeping a eye on you!

When we have the MRI/MRA on Friday and after that they will decide about another arteriogram.  If we find out about anything else, I will keep you informed.  Rox