POTENTIAL DIFFUSION AND VOLUME BIOMARKERS OF LONGITUDINAL NEUROPATHOLOGICAL CHANGE IN PREMANIFEST AND EARLY SYMPTOMATIC HUNTINGTON’S DISEASE: RESULTS OF IMAGE-HD 18-MONTH FOLLOW-UP
-
1
Monash University, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Australia
-
2
Monash University, Monash Biomedical Imaging, Australia
-
3
Monash Medical Centre, Department of Neurology, Australia
There is significant work world-wide aimed at identifying candidate treatments for delaying, reversing or preventing neural degeneration and the associated symptoms in Huntington’s disease (HD). Assessing the efficacy of such interventions depends on the availability of robust neurobiological markers sensitive in detecting change over a clinically relevant time-frame. Here we present potential biomarkers that reflect micro- and macro-structural disease related changes over 18 months. We acquired diffusion and T1 weighted images via 3T MRI from 31 pre-manifest HD (pre-HD), 31 early symptomatic HD (symp-HD), and 28 healthy control participants. We found longitudinal group differences in both striatal diffusivity measures (mean diffusivity, fractional anisotropy) and volume; diffusion measures however were more sensitive (than volumetric atrophy) to longitudinal neural deterioration in participants closer to onset and after diagnosis. In participants far from onset (~20 years), only rate of volume loss in the caudate nucleus discriminated between pre-HD and controls. There was also a significant increased rate of atrophy in whole brain and grey matter in pre-HD and symp-HD, compared with control participants. These findings characterise the differential patterns of rate of change across measures from two different imaging modalities at different stages of disease progression and provide further insight into the early neuropathological changes in HD. The findings also provide support for the sensitivity of multi-modal, longitudinal imaging to detect and track short-term change along the HD disease continuum.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all the participants who took part in this study. We are also grateful to the Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative (CHDI), Inc. (USA), for their support in funding this research.
Keywords:
Huntington's disease,
MRI,
volumetric MRI,
Mean diffusivity,
Anisotropy,
Longitudinal
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Other
Citation:
Domínguez D
JF,
Egan
GF,
Gray
MA,
Churchyard
A,
Chua
P,
Stout
JC and
Georgiou-Karistianis
N
(2012). POTENTIAL DIFFUSION AND VOLUME BIOMARKERS OF LONGITUDINAL NEUROPATHOLOGICAL CHANGE IN PREMANIFEST AND EARLY SYMPTOMATIC HUNTINGTON’S DISEASE: RESULTS OF IMAGE-HD 18-MONTH FOLLOW-UP
.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00032
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
25 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
07 Nov 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Juan F Domínguez D, Monash University, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia, juan.dominguez@monash.edu