Preliminary Investigation of Cerebral Blood Flow and Amyloid Burden in Veterans With and Without Combat-Related Traumatic Brain Injury.

This study aimed to examine global and regional cerebral blood flow and amyloid burden in combat veterans with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI). Cerebral blood flow (in milliliters per minute per 100 mL) was measured by quantitative [(15)O]water, and amyloid burden was measured by [(11)C]PIB imaging. Mean global cerebral blood flow was significantly lower in veterans with TBI compared with non-TBI veterans.

Assessing atrophy measurement techniques in dementia: Results from the MIRIAD atrophy challenge.

Structural MRI is widely used for investigating brain atrophy in many neurodegenerative disorders, with several research groups developing and publishing techniques to provide quantitative assessments of this longitudinal change. Often techniques are compared through computation of required sample size estimates for future clinical trials. However interpretation of such comparisons is rendered complex because, despite using the same publicly available cohorts, the various techniques have been assessed with different data exclusions and different statistical analysis models.

Beyond alcoholism: Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome in patients with psychiatric disorders.

Objective: Wernicke encephalopathy and Korsakoff syndrome (the combined disorder is named Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome [WKS]) are preventable, life-threatening neuropsychiatric syndromes resulting from thiamine deficiency. WKS has historically been associated with alcoholism; more recently, it has been recognized in patients who have anorexia nervosa or have undergone bariatric surgery for obesity. However, patients with nutritional deficiencies of any origin are at risk for WKS.

Striatal volume contributes to the prediction of onset of Huntington disease in incident cases.

Background: Previous neuroimaging research indicates that brain atrophy in Huntington disease (HD) begins many years before movement abnormalities become severe enough to warrant diagnosis. Most clinical trials being planned for individuals in the prediagnostic stage of HD propose to use delay of disease onset as the primary outcome measure. Although formulas have been developed based on age and CAG repeat length, to predict when HD motor onset will occur, it would be useful to have additional measures that can improve the accuracy of prediction of disease onset.

Longitudinal change in regional brain volumes in prodromal Huntington disease.

Objective: As therapeutics are being developed to target the underlying neuropathology of Huntington disease, interest is increasing in methodologies for conducting clinical trials in the prodromal phase. This study was designed to examine the potential utility of structural MRI measures as outcome measures for such trials.

Methods: Data are presented from 211 prodromal individuals and 60 controls, scanned both at baseline and at the 2-year follow-up.

Cerebral cortex structure in prodromal Huntington disease.

Neuroimaging studies of subjects who are gene-expanded for Huntington Disease, but not yet diagnosed (termed prodromal HD), report that the cortex is "spared," despite the decrement in striatal and cerebral white-matter volume. Measurement of whole-cortex volume can mask more subtle, but potentially clinically relevant regional changes in volume, thinning, or surface area. The current study addressed this limitation by evaluating cortical morphology of 523 prodromal HD subjects.

Striatal and white matter predictors of estimated diagnosis for Huntington disease.

Previous MRI studies with participants prior to manifest Huntington disease have been conducted in small single-site samples. The current study reports data from a systematic multi-national study during the prodromal period of Huntington disease and examines whether various brain structures make unique predictions about the proximity to manifest disease. MRI scans were acquired from 657 participants enrolled at 1 of 32 PREDICT-HD research sites.

Cerebellar volume and cognitive functioning in children who experienced early deprivation.

Background: The cerebellum is a brain region recognized primarily in the coordination of movement and related accessory motor functions. In addition, emerging evidence implicates the cerebellum in cognitive processes and suggests that this brain region might be subject to experience-dependent changes in structure. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the role of early environmental deprivation in the maturation of the cerebellum and aspects of cognitive development.

A method to fuse fMRI tasks through spatial correlations: applied to schizophrenia.

Single task analysis methods of functional MRI brain data, though useful, are not able to evaluate the joint information between tasks. Data fusion of multiple tasks that probe different cognitive processes provides knowledge of the joint information and may be important in order to better understand complex disorders such as schizophrenia. In this article, we introduce a simple but effective technique to fuse two tasks by computing the histogram of correlations for all possible combinations of whole brain voxels.

The neural correlates of implicit sequence learning in schizophrenia.

Twenty-seven schizophrenia spectrum patients and 25 healthy controls performed a probabilistic version of the serial reaction time task (SRT) that included sequence trials embedded within random trials. Patients showed diminished, yet measurable, sequence learning. Postexperimental analyses revealed that a group of patients performed above chance when generating short spans of the sequence.