Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, 60611, IL, USA.
Department of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, 60611, IL, USA.
Nat Commun. 2019 Aug 6;10(1):3524. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11244-3.
Damage to the corticospinal tract is widely studied following unilateral subcortical stroke, whereas less is known about changes to other sensorimotor pathways. This may be due to the fact that many studies investigated morphological changes in the brain, where the majority of descending and ascending brain pathways are overlapping, and did not investigate the brainstem where they separate. Moreover, these pathways continue passing through separate regions in the spinal cord. Here, using a high-resolution structural MRI of both the brainstem and the cervical spinal cord, we were able to identify a number of microstructurally altered pathways, in addition to the corticospinal tract, post stroke. Moreover, decreases in ipsi-lesional corticospinal tract integrity and increases in contra-lesional medial reticulospinal tract integrity were correlated with motor impairment severity in individuals with stroke.
皮质脊髓束损伤在单侧皮质下卒中后得到了广泛研究，而对其他感觉运动通路的变化则知之甚少。这可能是因为许多研究调查了大脑中的形态变化，而大多数下行和上行的大脑通路是重叠的，并没有研究脑干，而这些通路在那里是分开的。此外，这些通路在脊髓中继续通过不同的区域。在这里，我们使用脑桥和颈段脊髓的高分辨率结构 MRI，除了皮质脊髓束外，还能够在卒中后识别出许多结构改变的通路。此外，卒中患者患侧皮质脊髓束完整性的降低和对侧内侧网状脊髓束完整性的增加与运动障碍的严重程度相关。
