Quantitative MRI of cerebral white matter hyperintensities: A new approach towards understanding the underlying pathology

Interest in white matter hyperintensities (WMH), a radiological biomarker of small vessel disease, is continuously increasing. This is, in most part, due to our better understanding of their association with various clinical disorders, such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, and the overlapping path...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Fla.), 2019-11, Vol.202, p.116077-116077, Article 116077
Main Authors: Iordanishvili, Elene, Schall, Melissa, Loução, Ricardo, Zimmermann, Markus, Kotetishvili, Ketevan, Shah, N. Jon, Oros-Peusquens, Ana-Maria
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aging
Autopsy
Blood-brain barrier
Cerebrospinal fluid
Deep white matter hyperintensities
Edema
Fazekas scale
Inflammation
Magnetic resonance imaging
Myelin
NMR
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Pathology
Periventricular white matter hyperintensities
Population studies
Quantitative MRI
Substantia alba
Water content
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Interest in white matter hyperintensities (WMH), a radiological biomarker of small vessel disease, is continuously increasing. This is, in most part, due to our better understanding of their association with various clinical disorders, such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, and the overlapping pathology of WMH with these afflictions. Although post-mortem histological studies have reported various underlying pathophysiological substrates, in vivo research has not been specific enough to fully corroborate these findings. Furthermore, post-mortem studies are not able to capture which pathological processes are the driving force of the WMH severity. The current study attempts to fill this gap by non-invasively investigating the influence of WMH on brain tissue using quantitative MRI (qMRI) measurements of the water content (H2O), the longitudinal (T1) and effective transverse relaxation times (T2∗), as well as the semi-quantitative magnetization transfer ratio (MTR), and bound proton fraction (ƒbound). In total, seventy subjects (age range 50–80 years) were selected from a population-based aging cohort study, 1000BRAINS. Normal appearing grey (NAGM) and white matter (NAWM), as well as deep (DWMH) and periventricular (PWMH) white matter hyperintensities, were segmented and characterized in terms of their quantitative properties. The subjects were then further divided into four grades according to the Fazekas rating scale of severity. Groupwise analyses of the qMRI values in each tissue class were performed. All five qMRI parameters showed significant differences between WMH and NAWM (p 
ISSN:1053-8119
1095-9572
DOI:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116077