The Religious Orders Study and the Rush Memory and Aging Project are both cohort studies of aging and dementia that include organ donation at death. Together, more than 2,700 persons have agreed to annual clinical evaluation and brain donation at death. A subset of participants also participated in a substudy that included ante-mortem imaging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMild cognitive impairment (MCI) is rapidly becoming one of the most common clinical manifestations affecting the elderly. The pathologic and molecular substrate of people diagnosed with MCI is not well established. Since MCI is a human specific disorder and neither the clinical nor the neuropathological course appears to follow a direct linear path, it is imperative to characterize neuropathology changes in the brains of people who came to autopsy with a well-characterized clinical diagnosis of MCI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhite matter changes are one potential etiology of behavioral changes in cerebrovascular disease. Whole brain diffusion tensor imaging-fractional anisotropy (DTI-FA) as a measure of apparent white matter integrity is related to cognitive function in cerebrovascular disease. However, white matter changes are not uniform, nor are their effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To analyze the results of surgical treatment of intractable epilepsy in patients with subcortical band heterotopia, or double cortex syndrome, a diffuse neuronal migration disorder.
Methods: We studied eight patients (five women) with double cortex syndrome and intractable epilepsy. All had a comprehensive presurgical evaluation including prolonged video-EEG recordings and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Using quantitative structural MRI protocols, we examined the effects of age on alterations in entorhinal cortex (EC) volume. The left EC was found to be smaller than the right in both young and healthy aged subjects. More importantly, the right EC, but not the left, was significantly smaller in elderly participants compared to young controls.
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