Novel insights into cerebral venous thrombosis

Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVT) is a rare type of stroke in which a blood clot blocks the drainage of blood and cerebrospinal fluid from the brain. This disease mainly affects relatively young people. Several novel insights into CVT were presented in this thesis. We examined the risk of developing epilepsy after CVT, a new type of blood thinners for the treatment of children with CVT, as well as the risk of bleeding during blood thinning treatment in children with CVT who also have a head or neck infection. In addition, an entirely new disease entity was studied, namely CVT in the context of 'vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia' (VITT), which can develop in very rare cases after vaccination with adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccines. It was also demonstrated that the combination of features associated with this disease was extremely rare in patients with CVT prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing indirect evidence for a causal relationship between the adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccines and VITT-associated CVT.