Grey matter

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the association between past/current sleep duration and macro-/micro-structural brain outcomes and explore whether hypertension or social activity plays a role in such association. METHODS: Within the UK Biobank, 40 436 dementia-free participants (age 40-70 years) underwent a baseline assessment followed by a brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan 9 years later. Past (baseline) and current (MRI scans) sleep duration (hours/day) were recorded and classified as short (≤5), intermediate (6-8), and long (≥9)...

Singing-based treatments of aphasia can improve language outcomes, but the neural benefits of group-based singing in aphasia are unknown. Here, we set out to determine the structural neuroplasticity changes underpinning group-based singing induced treatment effects in chronic aphasia. Twenty-eight patients with at least mild nonfluent post-stroke aphasia were randomized into two groups that received a 4-month multicomponent singing intervention (singing group) or standard care control group). High-resolution T1-images and multi-shell diffusion-weighted MRI data were collected in two time points (baseline / 5-month)...

OBJECTIVE: Voxel-based morphometry (VBM), surface-based morphometry (SBM), and radiomics are widely used in the field of neuroimage analysis, while it is still unclear that the performance comparison between traditional morphometry and emerging radiomics methods in diagnosing brain aging. In this study, we aimed to develop a VBM-SBM model and a radiomics model for brain aging based on cognitively normal (CN) individuals and compare their performance to explore both methods' strengths, weaknesses, and relationships...

Preliminary studies demonstrated beneficial effects of dietary creatine across different post-viral fatigue syndromes. Creatine is often co-administered with glucose to improve its potency yet whether glucose boost the efficacy of creatine in long COVID remains currently unknown. In this report, we investigate the effects of 8-wk creatine intake with and without glucose on patient-reported outcomes, exercise tolerance, and tissue creatine levels in patients with long COVID. Fifteen male and female long COVID adult patients (age 39...

BACKGROUND CONTEXT: Degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) is the most common form of atraumatic spinal cord injury globally. Degeneration of spinal discs, bony osteophyte growth and ligament pathology results in physical compression of the spinal cord contributing to damage of white matter tracts and grey matter cellular populations. This results in an insidious neurological and functional decline in patients which can lead to paralysis. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) confirms the diagnosis of DCM and is a prerequisite to surgical intervention, the only known treatment for this disorder...

BACKGROUND: Wernicke's encephalopathy (WE) is an acute neurological syndrome resulting from thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. It has been recognized increasingly in non-alcoholic patients, such as in the condition of malnutrition. Recent literature has shed light on uncommon symptoms and neuroimaging findings. CASE REPORT: We reported a case of a 44-year-old male who initially presented with bilateral hearing loss, and exhibited abnormality in the splenium of the corpus callosum on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diffusion-weighted imaging sequence...

The glymphatic system is centred around brain cerebrospinal fluid flow and is enhanced during sleep, and the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis proposes that sleep acts on brain microstructure by selective synaptic downscaling. While so far primarily studied in animals, we here examine in humans if brain diffusivity and microstructure is related to time of day, sleep quality and cognitive performance. We use diffusion weighted images from 916 young healthy individuals, aged between 22 and 37 years, collected as part of the Human Connectome Project to assess diffusion tensor image analysis along the perivascular space index, white matter fractional anisotropy, intra-neurite volume fraction and extra-neurite mean diffusivity...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune, inflammatory, and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system for which there is no cure, making it necessary to search for new treatments. The endocannabinoid system (ECS) plays a very important neuromodulatory role in the CNS. In recent years, the formation of heteromers containing cannabinoid receptors and their up/downregulation in some neurodegenerative diseases have been demonstrated. Despite the beneficial effects shown by some phytocannabinoids in MS, the role of the ECS in its pathophysiology is unknown...

(1) Background: Bilingualism has been reported to shape the brain by inducing cortical changes in cortical and subcortical language and executive networks. Similar yet different to bilingualism, diglossia is common in Switzerland, where the German-speaking population switches between an everyday spoken Swiss German (CH-GER) dialect and the standard German (stGER) used for reading and writing. However, no data are available for diglossia, defined as the use of different varieties or dialects of the same language, regarding brain structure...

The relatively new tools of brain elastography have established a general trendline for healthy, aging adult humans, whereby the brain's viscoelastic properties "soften" over many decades. Earlier studies of the aging brain have demonstrated a wide spectrum of changes in morphology and composition towards the later decades of lifespan. This leads to a major question of causal mechanisms: of the many changes documented in structure and composition of the aging brain, which ones drive the long term trendline for viscoelastic properties of grey matter and white matter? The issue is important for illuminating which factors brain elastography is sensitive to, defining its unique role for study of the brain and clinical diagnoses of neurological disease and injury...

Quantifying an imaging modality's ability to reproduce results is important for establishing its utility. In magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI), new acquisition protocols are regularly introduced which improve upon their precursors with respect to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), total acquisition duration, and nominal voxel resolution. This study has quantified the within-subject and between-subject reproducibility of one such new protocol (reduced-field-of-view density-weighted concentric ring trajectory (rFOV-DW-CRT) MRSI) by calculating the coefficient of variance of data acquired from a test-retest experiment...

Therapeutic antibodies for reducing Aβ plaque load in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is currently making rapid progress. The diagnostic imaging of Aβ plaque load in AD has been underway and is now used in clinical studies. Here, we report our preliminary findings on imaging a therapeutic antibody, Lecanemab, in a postmortem AD brain anterior cingulate. [125 I]5-iodo-3-pyridinecarboxamido-Lecanemab ([125 I]IPC-Lecanemab) was prepared by coupling N -succinimidyl-5-([125 I]iodo)-3-pyridinecarboxylate with Lecanemab in modest yields...

We describe a case of Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder (NMOSD) mimicking Wernicke's Encephalopathy (WE) to highlight an atypical presentation of NMOSD. A 39-year-old female presented with subacute encephalopathy and progressive ophthalmoplegia. Her MRI revealed T2 hyperintensities involving the mammillary bodies, periaqueductal grey matter, medial thalami, third ventricle, and area postrema. Whole blood thiamine levels were elevated and she did not improve with IV thiamine. CSF was notable for lymphocytic pleocytosis and elevated protein...

While research has unveiled and quantified brain markers of abnormal neurodevelopment, clinicians still work with qualitative metrics for MRI brain investigation. The purpose of the current article is to bridge the knowledge gap between case-control cohort studies and individual patient care. Here, we provide a unique dataset of seventy-three 3-to-17 years-old healthy subjects acquired with a 6-minute MRI protocol encompassing T1 and T2 relaxation quantitative sequence that can be readily implemented in the clinical setting; MP2RAGE for T1 mapping and the prototype sequence GRAPPATINI for T2 mapping...

The response variability to repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) challenges the effective use of this treatment option in patients with schizophrenia. This variability may be deciphered by leveraging predictive information in structural MRI, clinical, sociodemographic, and genetic data using artificial intelligence. We developed and cross-validated rTMS response prediction models in patients with schizophrenia drawn from the multisite RESIS trial. The models incorporated pre-treatment sMRI, clinical, sociodemographic, and polygenic risk score (PRS) data...

Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) is known to improve motor function in advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) and to enable a reduction of anti-parkinsonian medication. While the levodopa challenge test and disease duration are considered good predictors of STN-DBS outcome, other clinical and neuroanatomical predictors are less established. This study aimed to evaluate, in addition to clinical predictors, the effect of patients' individual brain topography on DBS outcome. The medical records of 35 PD patients were used to analyze DBS outcomes measured with the following scales: Part III of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS-III) off medication at baseline, and at 6-months during medication off and stimulation on, use of anti-parkinsonian medication (LED), Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS) and Non-Motor Symptoms Questionnaire (NMS-Quest)...

Alterations in grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) are associated with memory impairment across the neurocognitive aging spectrum and theorised to spread throughout brain networks. Functional and structural connectivity (FC,SC) may explain widespread atrophy. We tested the effect of SC and FC to the hippocampus on cortical thickness (CT) of connected areas. In 419 (223 F) participants (agemean =73 ± 8) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, cortical regions associated with memory (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test) were identified using Lasso regression...

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease is characterized by large-scale structural changes in a specific pattern. Recent studies developed morphological similarity networks constructed by brain regions similar in structural features to represent brain structural organization. However, few studies have used local morphological properties to explore inter-regional structural similarity in Alzheimer's disease. METHODS: Here, we sourced T1-weighted MRI images of 342 cognitively normal participants and 276 individuals with Alzheimer's disease from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: White matter (WM) damage is the main target of hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), but mounting evidence indicates that genotype-specific grey matter (GM) damage is not uncommon. Our aim was to identify and compare brain GM and WM damage patterns in HSP subtypes and investigate how gene expression contributes to these patterns, and explore the relationship between GM and WM damage. METHODS: In this prospective single-centre cohort study from 2019 to 2022, HSP patients and controls underwent magnetic resonance imaging evaluations...

Despite the clinical significance of narcissistic personality, its neural bases have not been clarified yet, primarily because of methodological limitations of the previous studies, such as the low sample size, the use of univariate techniques and the focus on only one brain modality. In this study, we employed for the first time a combination of unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, to identify the joint contributions of grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) to narcissistic personality traits (NPT)...