Discriminative Pattern of Reduced Cerebral Blood Flow in Parkinson's Disease and Parkinsonism-Plus Syndrome: an ASL-MRI study

Abstract

Background: Accurate identification of Parkinson's disease (PD) and Parkinsonism-Plus syndrome (PPS), especially in the early stage of the disease, is very important. The purpose of this study was to investigate the discriminative spatial pattern of cerebral blood flow (CBF) between patients with PD and PPS.Methods: Arterial spin labeling (ASL) perfusion-weighted imaging was performed in 20 patients with PD (mean age 56.35±7.56 years), 16 patients with PPS (mean age 59.62±6.89 years), and 17 healthy controls (HCs, mean age 54.17±6.58 years). Voxel-wise comparison of the CBF was performed among PD, PPS and HC groups. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the performance of CBF in discriminating between PD and PPS.Results: PD group showed a significantly decreased CBF in the right cerebelum_crus2, the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), the triangle inferior frontal gyrus (IFG_Tri), the left frontal medial orbital gyrus (FG_Med_Orb) and the left caudate nucleus (CN) compared with the HC group (P < 0.05). Besides the above regions, the left supplementary motor area (SMA), the right thalamus had decreased CBF in the PPS group compared with the HC group (P < 0.05). PPS group had lower CBF value in the left MFG, the left IFG_Tri, the left CN, the left SMA, and the right thalamus compared with the PD group (P < 0.05). CBFs in left IFG_Tri, the left CN, the left SMA, and the right thalamus had moderate to high capacity in discriminating between PD and PPS patients (AUC 0.719-0.831).Conclusion: PD and PPS patients have certain discriminative patterns of reduced CBFs, which can be used as a surrogate marker for differential diagnosis.

The role of the autonomic nervous system in cerebral blood flow regulation in dementia: A review

“…Reduced CBF has been demonstrated in patients with PDD (Cheng et al, 2020;Lin et al, 2017;Melzer et al, 2011;Wei et al, 2016) and DLB (Fong et al, 2011), and is associated with cognitive deficit (Cheng et al, 2020;Melzer et al, 2011;Paschali et al, 2009). In patients with DLB, AChEI were able to improve perfusion in the temporal, parietal and occipital cortices, and were associated with improved verbal fluency (Fong et al, 2011).…”

Investigation of changes in the activity and function of dry eye-associated brain regions using the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations method

“…It is the central area of Broca's sports language area and participates in the evaluation of sensory and emotional information [23] . Research has shown that there is a certain connection between this area and Parkinson's syndrome [24] . Yu et al reported that the ALFF value of the left IFG was significantly reduced in patients with diabetic retinopathy [25].…”