I live in a Spanish speaking country at the moment and recently my avm bled so an angio-rm was performed and the results were the following:
Please note this was translated from very formal Spanish which even to me(spanish speaking person) is messed up; so I tried to tranlate it as best as I could.
We observe in the frontoparietal upper right parasagittal region,
a presence of a vascular nest malformation characterized by an afferent anterior cerebral artery bouquet,
a capillary nest which is located in the parasagital right side convexity and an eference of a dural vein, which drains the superior sagittal sinus.Conclusion:
Presence of a superior right parasagital frontoparietal avm grade 3 discovered.</blockquote
I dont understand any of this, does someone have any knowledge or experience on what that all means and how it's relevant to treatments and overall prognosis.
Hi Marioemar,
The first sentence is the location of the avm. I'm not sure where that is without looking it up. The rest of it is a very good explanation of the avm itself. What they are calling an "artery bouquet" is the malformation of the arteries. Which means, there are extra arteries that should not be there --- the avm. I am assuming there are veins involved too, even though it doesn't say that. Where it mentions the "drain" (If I understand it right) - is a description of the path. All arteries and veins flow in a direction. An in and out (so-to say). The "drain" is the outing of it, the direction it's flowing. I hope this helps you. I'm sure others will answer you soon... :)
If I have missed something everyone, please feel free to add to it and/or correct me if I made a mistake trying to explain this.
Ben :)
The Spetzler Martin Grading Scale estimates the risk of open neurosurgery for a patient with AVM, by evaluating AVM size, pattern of venous drainage, and eloquence of brain location. A Grade 1 AVM would be considered as small, superficial, and located in non-eloquent brain, and low risk for surgery. Grade 4 or 5 AVM are large, deep, and adjacent to eloquent brain. Grade 6 AVM is considered not operable.
Looks like you have a Grade 3 AVM.
If you run a google image search on "frontoparietal," you can see diagrams of which part of the skull would be involved in a frontoparietal craniotomy. You can also search images for "parasagittal."
Thanks Ben,Barbara and dancermom for the replies. I wanted to understand how all that information connected to treatments and overall prognosis and most importantly personal inputs on grade 3 avms. If anybody here has had an experience with the different varieties of grade 3 AVM's and the different treatments options that people had.
Your doctors are your best guides for this, and getting several opinions is helpful. You may also wish to check out this detailed report on radiosurgery: http://www.cns.org/publications/clinical/55/pdf/cnb00108000108.pdf
In the report, a table lists parietal avms as "Mild Risk" Avms (a lot of us would take issue with the terminology) -- apparently, frontal lobe avms have the lowest risk of side effects from radiosurgery, and the brainstem and pons have the highest risk.
You can also use the search box in the upper right corner to search for "grade 3" or "parietal" to find the stories of those with similar avms.