Regional atrophy of the corpus callosum in dementia

Abstract

The regional distribution of degeneration of the corpus callosum (CC) in dementia is not yet clear. This study compared regional CC size in participants (n 5 179) from the Cache County Memory and Aging Study. Participants represented a range of cognitive function: Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia (VaD), mild ambiguous (MA-cognitive problems, but not severe enough for diagnosis of dementia), and healthy older adults. CC outlines obtained from midsagittal magnetic resonance images were divided into 99 equally spaced widths. Factor analysis of these callosal widths identified 10 callosal regions. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant group differences for anterior and posterior callosal regions. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons of CC regions in patient groups as compared to the control group (controlling for age) revealed trends toward smaller anterior and posterior regions, but not all were statistically significant. As compared to controls, significantly smaller anterior and posterior CC regions were found in the AD group; significantly smaller anterior CC regions in the VaD group; but no significant CC regional differences in the MA group. Findings suggest that dementia-related CC atrophy occurs primarily in the anterior and posterior portions. (JINS, 2008, 14, 414-423.)

In Vivo Structural Neuroanatomy of Corpus Callosum in Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Different MRI Techniques: A Review

“…By contrast, Thomann and coworkers [10] reported a reduction in the anterior subregion (rostrum, genu, anterior body) of the CC in a group of MCI patients with different cognitive subtypes (amnesic and multidomain amnesic, hereafter called MCI "all subtypes") using the ROI approach. Finally, Hallam et al [43] re- Fig. 2.…”

“…Numerous ROI studies have investigated callosal changes in AD patients [7,[10][11][12][14][15][16][17][18][19]24,25,27,28,31,38,42,43]. Overall, these studies report a reduction of the total callosal area, specifically of the rostrum, genu, anterior body, isthmus, and splenium of the CC.…”

“…In a previous study [7], we demonstrated that the pre-definition of callosal regions can give rise to erroneous results. To overcome these limits, some studies investigated callosal morphology using ROI analysis, which does not involve traditional parcellation [20,43,46], or applying an automated technique, such as VBM [8,10,20,66], which completely eliminates the manual tracing step.…”

“…In fact, the main result mentioned above, that is atrophy mainly in the callosal anterior and posterior subregions, comes from studies of AD groups that included patients in different illness stages, ranging from mild to severe dementia [7,8,[10][11][12][14][15][16][17][18][19][23][24][25][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] and sometimes selected using different diagnostic criteria [10,14].…”

Corpus Callosum and Ventricle: MRI Determination of Dementia in Turkish Population and Healthy Geriatric Subjects

“…If disease affects the CC, there are some problems as visual, somesthetic, hearing, kinesthetic and function impairment (Laissy et al, 1993). Some methodologies divide the CC into four parts: the rostrum; the genu, the splenium and the body (Georgy et al;Hallam et al, 2008). Furthermore, subregions of the CC (i.e., genu, rostrum, trunk, isthmus, splenium) are thought to play seperately different roles in cognition (Ota et al).…”