Carotid Sclerosis Case Study Essay

The patient is a 62 year old Caucasian female who had a partial obstruction in the carotid artery on the right side for over two years and had a stroke in the right hemisphere 6 months ago. The main common carotid artery splits into the external carotid artery and the internal carotid artery. The external carotid artery supplies blood to the exterior features outside of the skull, primarily the exterior of the face and the neck. The internal carotid artery supplies blood to the interior of the skull, including the anterior of the brain, the eyes and its appendages. The first main branch of the internal carotid is the ophthalmic artery which further branches into the central retinal artery.
If the patient was known to have a partial obstruction on the right carotid artery 2 years ago, we can assume a thrombus which originated from this obstruction was later lodged downstream causing the stroke in the right hemisphere. It is also evident that the partial obstruction in the internal carotid became further constricted overtime because of the buildup of plaque and atherosclerosis further
The patient’s visual field defects are characterized as left homonymous hemianopia with macular sparing which is defined as visual field loss in the left ipsilateral region of oculus unitas. The nerve bundles which are extended from the retina consist of the ganglion cell axons which make up the optic tract. The semidecassation is the incomplete crossing of nerve fibers at the optic chiasm which results in each optic tract containing half of the ipsilateral optic nerve and one half of the contralateral optic nerve such that the ipsilateral hemifield from each eye correlates to the contralateral hemisphere (Leff 2004). Due to this phenomenon we can infer that the left homonymous hemianopia is due to a lesion in the right optic tract or the right occipital lobe as shown below in Figure