Is Moyamoya really progressive??

Something you will often read in the forums or on wikipedia, etc is that Moyamoya is a progressive disease.

Here is a study that was published in 2005 in Stroke journal that studies the actual rate of progression.

http://tinyurl.com/5wjuv5

They started with 120 patients that had been diagnosed with moyamoya disease over a 14 year period, 1990 to 2004. They wanted to study only the sides of the brain that did not have the bypass operation and so they found 23 patients with NO operations (46 sides) and 40 patients with a bypass operation on one side, they studied the other.

This created a pool of 86 sides all told and 15 of the 86 sides had progression. That actually occurred in 15 of 63 patients.

8 of the 23 patients with no operations and 7 of the 40 with operations on the other side.

You will see that of the 15, 13 were WOMEN, so ladies are at a much higher risk for getting Moyamoya and for its progression.

To those who are considering your options, I think this is pretty good information to have!

Let me point out something else that validates the "2 year cycle" mentioned below. The folks that had bilateral Moyamoya (on both sides of brain), the interval between onset (first symptom) and progression was 28 months on avg. See the quote below.

"The interval between their onset and disease progression was 28.4±26.3 months, ranging from 1 month to 8 years, and was significantly shorter in patients with bilateral moyamoya disease than in those with unilateral moyamoya disease."

The folks that originally were diagnosed with Moyamoya on one side, progressed to the other side in 4 of 11 patients. That occurred over a 36 month period on average.

"The interval between their onset and disease progression varied from 1.5 to 8 years (60.0±36.3 months). All of the patients were women."