Quantitative NMR measurements of hippocampal atrophy in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging was employed to study 10 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and seven healthy elderly control subjects. Coronal sections were used to make volumetric measurements of the hippocampus, ventricles, subarachnoid space, and brain parenchyma. The hippocampal volume (normalized relative to the size of the lenticular nucleus) was reduced by 40% in the AD group compared to the controls, with no overlap between the two groups. Overall measures of brain atrophy and ventricular and sulcal enlargement also showed significantly different group means, although with overlap between the two groups. Hippocampal atrophy did not correlate with either overall brain atrophy or dementia severity, although the degree of brain atrophy was correlated with dementia severity. These results show that NMR is capable of providing in vivo quantification of diminished hippocampal size in AD which is not correlated with overall brain atrophy and which may differentiate AD from normal aging.

The relation between global and limbic brain volumes on MRI and cognitive performance in healthy individuals across the age range

“…Based upon what is known from patient studies (e.g. [17,33,38,39]), it was expected that reductions in total brain volume would be related to a decline in performance on global cognitive tests measuring speed of mental processing, whereas atrophy of limbic structures (hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus and mamillary bodies; and third ventricle as an index for the dorsomedial thalamus [19]) would be specifically associated with a deterioration on memory tests. We found a somewhat different pattern.…”

“…Alzheimer's disease and Korsakoff's syndrome) have demonstrated that damage to specific brain structures is indeed related to deterioration of cognitive functions. In these studies memory impairment is often associated with atrophy of limbic structures (including hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus [17], thalamus [38], or third ventricle [39], and mamillary bodies [36]), whereas global cognitive deficits such as slower mental processing is related to more general cerebral atrophy [33,35].…”

Age effects on atrophy rates of entorhinal cortex and hippocampus

“…Cross-sectional MRI studies have shown that AD patients have significantly greater ERC and hippocampal atrophy than cognitively normal (CN) subjects [9,21,26,48,57]. Longitudinal MRI studies have suggested that the rates of ERC and hippocampal atrophy may be useful in predicting AD before the onset of clinical symptoms and in assessing the potential usefulness of pharmacological interventions in treatment trials [10,22,24,27,43].…”

Age effects on hippocampal structural changes in old men: The HAAS

“…Hippocampal volumes, measured in-vivo, using quantitative 3D MRI have been investigated in many aging and dementia related studies (Seab et al, 1988, Jack et al, 1992, Juottonen et al, 1999, Laakso et al, 2000, Sencakova et al, 2001, Du et al, 2002. As Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) are two common types of dementia, volumetric measures of hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe structures in both disease groups are often compared to non-demented controls.…”