McKeown Martin J, Uthama Ashish, Abugharbieh Rafeef, Palmer Samantha, Lewis Mechelle, Huang Xuemei
Pacific Parkinson's Research Center, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
BMC Neurol. 2008 Apr 16;8:8. doi: 10.1186/1471-2377-8-8.
Recent pathological studies have suggested that thalamic degeneration may represent a site of non-dopaminergic degeneration in Parkinson's Disease (PD). Our objective was to determine if changes in the thalami could be non-invasively detected in structural MRI images obtained from subjects with Parkinson disease (PD), compared to age-matched controls.
No significant differences in volume were detected in the thalami between eighteen normal subjects and eighteen PD subjects groups. However significant (p < 0.03) shape differences were detected between the Left vs. Right thalami in PD, between the left thalami in PD and controls, and between the right thalami in PD and controls using a recently-developed, spherical harmonic-based representation.
Systematic changes in thalamic shape can be non-invasively assessed in PD in vivo. Shape changes, in addition to volume changes, may represent a new avenue to assess the progress of neurodegenerative processes. Although not directly discernable at the resolution of standard MRI, previous pathological studies would suggest that the shape changes detected in this study represent degeneration in the centre median-parafascicular (CM-Pf) complex, an area known to represent selective non-dopaminergic degeneration in PD.
近期的病理学研究表明，丘脑变性可能是帕金森病（PD）中非多巴胺能变性的一个部位。我们的目的是确定与年龄匹配的对照组相比，能否在帕金森病（PD）患者的结构MRI图像中无创检测到丘脑的变化。
18名正常受试者和18名PD受试者组的丘脑体积未检测到显著差异。然而，使用最近开发的基于球谐函数的表示方法，在PD患者的左、右丘脑之间、PD患者的左丘脑与对照组之间以及PD患者的右丘脑与对照组之间检测到了显著的（p < 0.03）形状差异。
可以在体内对PD患者的丘脑形状进行无创评估。除了体积变化外，形状变化可能代表了评估神经退行性过程进展的新途径。虽然在标准MRI分辨率下无法直接辨别，但先前的病理学研究表明，本研究中检测到的形状变化代表了中央中核-束旁核（CM-Pf）复合体的变性，该区域已知在PD中代表选择性非多巴胺能变性。
