Persistent Hypoglossal Artery

Cerebral angiography has now become a safer and more widely employed technique in the study of disorders of the brain. As a result, vascular anomalies within the cervicocranial circulation have been demonstrated more frequently in recent years. In the past decade there have been numerous published reports concerning persistent anomalous communications between the carotid and basilar arterial systems.¹⁻⁷Almost all of these reports have been concerned with the trigeminal artery. Padget⁸,⁹demonstrated that in early embryonic development there are three vessels joining the carotid and basilar arterial systems, namely, the primitive trigeminal, acoustic, and hypoglossal arteries. The acoustic artery undergoes involution first, and it has not been observed to persist in man unless one accepts a case reported as a postmortem finding by Altmann 10 in 1947. The trigeminal artery normally disappears after development of the posterior communicating artery. Although no trace of it is ordinarily found in