Abstract #1183

White Matter Integrity in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimers Disease: A Diffusion-Tensor Imaging Study

Claire E. Sexton¹, Clare Elizabeth Mackay¹, Mark E. Bastin², Jane Lonie³, Klaus Peter Ebmeier^1,3

¹Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; ²MRC Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; ³Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) describes patients with cognitive problems, who dont qualify for a diagnosis of dementia. Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) is a fully automated whole brain analysis technique for diffusion-tensor imaging that projects all subjects' FA data onto a mean FA tract skeleton, before applying voxel-wise cross-subject statistics. Patients with Alzheimers and MCI were compared with healthy controls using TBSS to investigate the effect of MCI on white matter integrity. Global FA was decreased in AD and MCI. The spatial distribution of changes in MCI paralleled those in AD. DTI may become useful in the early diagnosis of MCI.