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In the last decade, extracranial spontaneous cervical artery dissection (sCAD) became increasingly recognised as a common cause of juvenile stroke. Hereditary connective tissue diseases such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome type IV (EDS IV) and Marfan syndrome can be associated with sCAD and clinical signs of mild connective tissue weakness have been described in some patients with sCAD.1 Brandt and co-workers found connective tissue aberrations mainly affecting the collagen fibres in skin biopsies of approximately 60% of patients with sCAD.2 Similar skin aberrations were found in patients with intracranial aneurysms (IA).3 A familial association of IA and sCAD has been observed in a few families.4 These findings suggest that connective tissue abnormalities are common to both diseases and might predispose to IA as well as to sCAD. Recently, association between the functional coding single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs42524 in the collagen 1A2 (COL1A2) gene and IA has been described.5 The SNP …