Morphological alterations in the caudate, putamen, pallidum, and thalamus in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Like many neurodegenerative diseases, the clinical symptoms of Parkinsons disease (PD) do not manifest until significant progression of the disease has already taken place, motivating the need for sensitive biomarkers of the disease. While structural imaging is a potentially attractive method due to its widespread availability and non-invasive nature, global morphometric measures (e.g., volume) have proven insensitive to subtle disease change. Here we use individual surface displacements from deformations of an average surface model to capture disease related changes in shape of the subcortical structures in PD. Data were obtained from both the University of British Columbia (UBC) [n = 54 healthy controls (HC) and n = 55 Parkinsons disease (PD) patients] and the publicly available Parkinsons Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) [n = 137 (HC) and n = 189 (PD)] database. A high dimensional non-rigid registration algorithm was used to register target segmentation labels (caudate, putamen, pallidum, and thalamus) to a set of segmentation labels defined on the average-template. The vertex-wise surface displacements were significantly different between PD and HC in thalamic and caudate structures. However, overall displacements did not correlate with disease severity, as assessed by the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). The results from this study suggest disease-relevant shape abnormalities can be robustly detected in subcortical structures in PD. Future studies will be required to determine if shape changes in subcortical structures are seen in the prodromal phases of the disease.

Alterations of putaminal shape in de novo Parkinson's disease

“…In the current study, putaminal involvement had a greater extent over the lateral aspect when patients with bilateral DAT‐SPECT putaminal damage were included in the analysis, thus suggesting that this surface is involved later in the course of the disease. In line with Nemmi and coworkers, we did not find damage in the posterior putamen, whereas other researchers did . To a deeper analysis, this finding occurred in patients with longer disease duration and not drug‐naïve; indeed, in the only study on de novo‐PD, patients were older and presented, on average, worse UPDRS‐ME scores than our cohort.…”

“…Very recently, several studies have applied shape analysis to patients with PD, but results are inconsistent. Of these, only one study targeted drug‐naïve patients, whereas the others dealt with patients undergoing medications, either cognitively normal or showing cognitive deficits or apathy …”

Striatal and Hippocampal Atrophy in Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease Patients without Dementia: A Morphometric Analysis

“…An additional limitation of previous studies is that while atrophy of the hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe cortex are reported as common features in PD (7, 8, 19, 20), morphometric studies have either not addressed (11, 13, 16, 17) or found (3, 12, 14, 15, 18, 21) hippocampal shape differences.…”

Marked brain asymmetry with intact cognitive functioning in idiopathic Parkinson’s disease: a longitudinal analysis

“…While one study showed larger contralateral ventricle volumes in individuals with PD (Lewis et al, 2009) another study did not (Price et al, 2011). There is evidence that individuals with PD have bilateral basal ganglia volume loss regardless of side of onset (Geng, Li, & Zee, 2006) with the putamen the primarily affected structure (Price et al, 2016; Garg et al, 2015; Nemmi et al, 2015). Using shape (morphometric) analyses of subcortical gray matter structures, however, provides evidence of greater contralateral than ipsilateral shape changes in PD for both the putamen and caudate nucleus (Sterling et al, 2013; Caligiuri et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2014).…”