Normal-appearing grey and white matter T₁ abnormality in early relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis: a longitudinal study

Abstract

There are significant and persistent abnormalities of NAWM and GM T(1) in early relapsing-remitting MS. Further studies should address whether such T(1) measures have a role in prognosis or therapeutic monitoring.

Short-term stability of T 1 and T 2 relaxation measures in multiple sclerosis normal appearing white matter

“…Our results also support the findings of Davies et al [41] whose study showed no evidence of serial change in mean T 1 and peak location measures of 23 RRMS subjects over a 36-month follow-up period. They did find weak evidence for a decline over time in NAWM T 1 peak height but rejected such findings due to lack of significant difference between patient-control rate of change.…”

“…Therefore, we did 3 Normalized histograms of NAWM for two subjects (solid line and dashed line) at months 0 (black) and 6 (grey) for T 1 and T 2 relxation-derived metrics: a T 1 , b MWF and c GMT 2 . No statistically significant change was observed over time; however, clear intersubject variability exists not observe the larger changes seen by other T 1 -relaxation studies that have shown peak height to decrease from a range of 1.6-7% per year [26,27,41,42]. In particular, previous longitudinal studies of RRMS subjects have found similarly small longitudinal changes in NAWM T 1 mean and peak location.…”

MRI in Multiple Sclerosis: What’s Inside the Toolbox?

“…151 Such measures can detect diffuse damage in areas of the CNS that are free of overt lesions on conventional MRI scans. 94,[152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159][160][161] Furthermore, T1 mapping may be more sensitive than MTR in detecting tissue damage in NAWM. 94 The most common effect of MS on T1 relaxation is prolongation, which is believed to result from a variety of processes such as edema, demyelination, gliosis, and axonal loss in NAWM profound prolongation of T1 is seen when comparing patients with SPMS to patients with RRMS 160 and in patients with early RRMS versus normal controls.…”

Texture analysis of magnetization transfer maps from patients with clinically isolated syndrome and multiple sclerosis

“…That the statistical differences seen between the groups mostly relate to the CDMS group being separated from the controls and CIS patients indicate that the texture parameters are detecting pathological changes in the NABT in the CDMS group, but not in those who presented with a CIS and had no subsequent clinical events. This is not unexpected, in that diffuse damage of the normal-appearing brain in CDMS has been well established (23,24), while those subjects with a CIS are more likely to have less normal-appearing tissue damage seen with MTR (25,26). However, MTR has been shown to be abnormal in CIS NAGM and NAWM (27,28), indicating that texture analysis is less sensitive than some MTR parameters to subtle abnormality per se, but may be more specific in detecting more marked pathological changes associated with further clinical events and disability (the latter indicated by the correlations with the clinical measures of disability).…”