Case Reports in Vascular Medicine
Volume 2017 (2017), Article ID 9895414, 1 page
https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9895414

Letter to the Editor

Response to: Comment on “Failure of the Pipeline Embolization Device in Posterior Communicating Artery Aneurysms Associated with a Fetal Posterior Cerebral Artery”

Mario Zanaty,¹ Nohra Chalouhi,² Robert M. Starke,³ Pascal Jabbour,² Katherine O. Ryken,¹ Ketan R. Bulsara,⁴ and David Hasan¹

¹Department of Neurosurgery, University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, 200 Hawkins Drive, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
²Department of Neurological Surgery, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, 3rd Floor, 901 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, USA
³Department of Neurosurgery, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA
⁴Department of Neurosurgery, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519, USA

Correspondence should be addressed to David Hasan; david-hasan@uiowa.edu

Received 16 January 2017; Accepted 28 February 2017; Published 30 May 2017

Academic Editor: Boris Krischek

Copyright © 2017 Mario Zanaty et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We would like to thank Dr. Srinivasan and Dr. Kan for their remarks [1] on our paper [2]. We think that these publications were developed simultaneously. In addition, we think that more series would be reported in the future regarding the failure of the pipeline in the treatment of posterior communicating artery aneurysms associated with a fetal posterior cerebral artery. We also congratulate Srinivasan et al. [3] and Kan et al. [4] on their work on this topic and we agree that the most likely explanation of the pipeline failure is the high flow demand in this type of circulation. This can also explain why parent artery occlusion can lead to cerebellar infarction in this subset of patients [5]. We are also working on reporting other aneurysm geometrical factors that contribute to failure of flow-diversion; however this work is still in its early stages.

Disclosure

Robert M. Starke is currently affiliated to Department of Neurosurgery and Radiology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

References

V. M. Srinivasan and P. Kan, “Comment on ‘failure of the pipeline embolization device in posterior communicating artery aneurysms associated with a fetal posterior cerebral artery’,” Case Reports in Vascular Medicine, vol. 2017, Article ID 1685358, 1 pages, 2017.

M. Zanaty, N. Chalouhi, R. M. Starke et al., “Failure of the pipeline embolization device in posterior communicating artery aneurysms associated with a fetal posterior cerebral artery,” Case Reports in Vascular Medicine, vol. 2016, Article ID 4691275, 4 pages, 2016.

V. Srinivasan, P. Kan, N. Mbabuike et al., “Oral Presentations 2016 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting Chicago, IL ∗ April 30–May 4, 2016,” Journal of Neurosurgery, vol. 124, no. 4, pp. A1146–A1209, 2016.

P. Kan, E. Duckworth, A. Puri, G. Velat, and A. Wakhloo, “Treatment failure of fetal posterior communicating artery aneurysms with the pipeline embolization device,” Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 945–948, 2016.

H. Matsumura, N. Kato, Y. Fujiwara et al., “Endovascular treatments for posterior cerebral artery aneurysms and vascular insufficiency of fetal-type circulation after parent artery occlusion,” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 32, pp. 41–46, 2016.