Carotid Atherosclerosis Assessment Using Ultrasonography – Making it an Easy and Valuable Tool for the General Practitioner

The thromboembolism of an asymptomatic carotid artery stenosis (CAS) causes stroke in 10-15% cases and in Europe, stroke causes more than 1 million deaths a year. This important cause of mortality may be evaluated by duplex ultrasound (DUS).

In five decades of experience, carotid DUS has proven to be a risk -free procedure, being widely available, easy to use, inexpensive, painless and quite reproducible.

The purpose of this article was to try to extend the usual indications of DUS assessment of carotid atherosclerosis (CA) in order to offer a tool for less experienced ultrasonographers to gather useful information for optimizing patient’s management. We tried to review the literature and to provide a simple, easy to apply algorithm for estimating the presence and severity of CA.