Risk and Benefit of Anticoagulation in Patients with Acute Hemispheric Infarctions: Preliminary Results of a Prospective Study

In clinical practice neurologists are often confronted with stroke patients who are at high risk of recurrent stroke. Approximately 12% of patients who have had cardiogenic brain embolism experience reinfarction within a 2-week period after the initial attack [4–6, 14] (Table 1). This rate is similar to that for most cardiac sources of emboli (Table 2) except for nonvalvular atrial fibrillation, which seems to be characterized by a lower risk of reinfarction [4–6, 22]. This does not contradict the fact that nonvalvular atrial fibrillation is the most frequent source of cerebral embolism [6, 22, 24, 27], particularly at the time of onset of dysrhythmia [17].