Provides important information from anatomy to pathophysiology and covers most neurological disorders that involve venous circulation. Venous circulation has not been extensively studied and we know relatively little about cerebral venous circulation. Venous circulation contributes to half of the brain circulation and about 70% of the blood in the brain is venous blood. Veins and venules play extremely important roles in brain circulation especially during pathologies such as brain edema, BBB disruption, elevation of intracranial pressure during and after ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke events, traumatic brain injury, neurodegerative disorders, in adults and newborns. Occlusion of veins or sinuses by thrombus, compression of veins and venules by tumor and edematous tissues, elevation of venous pressure during cranial hypertension, all lead to fatal insults such as venous infarction and hemorrhage.
Despite decades of efforts in basic and clinical research worldwide, stroke remains an intractable disease associated with high morbidity and mortality. Since 1847, R. Virchow’s observation that venous thrombi often migrate to the lungs and other organs, which were subsequently named “embolism” and “thrombosis”, the origins of ischemia, has altered our understanding of stroke [1, 2]. Since then, neurologists started to emphasize the vascular cause of ischemic stroke and prevention in the 1950s, which was followed by the introduction of endovascular therapies in the 1 Neurovascular Network as Future Therapeutic Targets 1980s and recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rtPA) in the 1990s [3, 4]. These strategies tended to retard ischemia progression and to re-establish vascular reperfusion. To date, these strategies remain at the frontline of early treatment after stroke [5], partially due to failures related to clinical translational studies of neuro- protective drugs based on the concept of neuroprotection to reduce infarction since 1980s [6].