Central nervous system in childhood-onset SLE shows an increased risk of damage due to onset age, accumulating disease effect and other possible pathophysiologic mechanisms. Thus, an understanding of the timing and extent of changes occurring in the brains of these young patients with SLE is important for new therapeutic strategies. With this purpose, we investigated whether brain network and white matter microstructural changes occur in non-neuropsychiatric SLE patients with disease onset at childhood. TBSS and graph analysis of DTI data, showed significant alterations in white matter integrity and global and nodal connectivity, which revealed correlations with disease duration and severity.
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