Hedok Lee1, Chen Hoffmann2, Oren
S. Cohen3, Peter B. Kingsley4, Isak Prohovnik1,5
1Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of
Medicine, New York, United States; 2Radiology, Sheba Medical
Center, Tel Aviv, Israel; 3Neurology, Sheba Medical Center, Tel
Aviv, Israel; 4Radiology, North Shore University Hospital,
Manhasset, NY, United States; 5Radiology, Mount Sinai School of
Medicine, New York, United States
To
test the sensitivity of DTI to detect white matter integrity in
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), we scanned 21 CJD patients and 19 healthy
controls, computed fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity, radial
diffusivity (RD), and axial diffusivity, and quantitatively compared the
results in voxel-level analyses of tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS). In
CJD patients, significant FA reductions in distinct and functionally relevant
white matter (WM) pathways correlated with disease duration and reflected an
elevation of RD, suggesting augmented permeability of axonal membranes. Our
findings demonstrate involvement of WM pathways connecting structural
landmarks that are known to be involved in the disease.
Keywords