Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
6038970 | NeuroImage | 2008 | 7 Pages |
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in the elderly. Classic symptoms of the disease include memory loss and confusion associated with the hallmark neuro-pathologic lesions of neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and senile plaques (SP) and their sequelae, gray matter atrophy. Volumetric assessment methods measure tissue atrophy, which typically follows early biochemical changes. An alternate MRI contrast mechanism to visualize the early pathological changes is T1Ï (or “T-1-rho”), the spin lattice relaxation time constant in the rotating frame, which determines the decay of the transverse magnetization in the presence of a “spin-lock” radio-frequency field. Macromolecular changes (in plaques and tangles) that accompany early AD are expected to alter bulk water T1Ï relaxation times. In this work, we measure T1Ï MRI on patients with clinically diagnosed AD, MCI and in age-matched cognitively normal control subjects in order to compare T1Ï values with changes in brain volume in the same regions of the brain and demonstrate that T1Ï can potentially constitute an important biomarker of AD.
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Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Authors
Arijitt Borthakur, Matthew Sochor, Christos Davatzikos, John Q. Trojanowski, Christopher M. Clark,