Intracranial Hemorrhage in Cerebral Arteriovenous Anomalies

The significance of intracranial bleeding from ruptured aneurysm is well appreciated. The high mortality rate resulting from such intracranial catastrophies has been reported in detail by Hamby, 1 Wolf and associates, 2 Magee, 3 and others. Although figures from these various authors differ to some extent, an approximation arrived at by Williams and co-workers 4 in a recent paper perhaps expresses the experiences of most students of the subject. These authors found that approximately one-third of the patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage resulting from cerebral aneurysm died within the first 48 hours, another third died in the following 12 days, and a sixth died within the remainder of the first 4 weeks. The remaining sixth survived longer than four weeks. On the other hand, Logue 5 reported a mortality rate of 13.5% for surgically treated patients with these lesions, against a rate of 44.4% for a control group of patients who