Morphological and clinical features of small cava septi pellucidi: A post mortem study

Abstract

Small cava septi pellucidi (CSP) are sometimes automatically regarded as an anatomical variation (asymptomatic CSP), especially if they could not be associated with a neuropsychiatric disorder, like schizophrenia or alcoholism (symptomatic CSP). Our aim was to investigate the impact of symptomatic CSP in the population in which CSP length was less or equal to 6 mm (criterion established by Nopoulos et al in 1997). We have overlooked 479 post mortem brains that underwent serial frozen sections in the axial plane on 1.5 mm of thickness. A sample of 110 CSP was obtained, among which 50 were adequate for this study. In our sample, 26 CSP were asymptomatic, 13 were on alcoholic brains, 6 were obtained from subjects who faced one or several head trauma and later manifested aggressive behavior, and remaining 5 belonged to schizophrenics. There were no major differences in lengths and widths measured, except between the lengths of CSP in schizophrenics and alcoholics (p<0.05, Bonferroni post hoc correction). Cava shorter or equal to 6 mm were normal variation in more than a half of our sample. Symptomatic CSP had a representative impact of 48%, out of which majority was revealed in alcoholics. We suggest a precaution before classify a small CSP into anatomical variations.