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Diffusion tensor imaging parameters’ changes of cerebellar hemispheres in Parkinson’s disease

  • Functional Neuroradiology
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Abstract

Introduction

Studies with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) analysis have produced conflicting information about the involvement of the cerebellar hemispheres in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We, thus, used a new approach for the analysis of DTI parameters in order to ascertain the involvement of the cerebellum in PD.

Methods

We performed a fiber tract-based analysis of cerebellar peduncles and cerebellar hemispheres in 16 healthy subjects and in 16 PD patients with more than 5 years duration of disease, using a 3T MRI scanner and a constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD) approach for tractographic reconstructions. In addition, we performed statistical analysis of DTI parameters and fractional anisotropy (FA) XYZ direction samplings.

Results

We found a statistically significant decrement of FA values in PD patients compared to controls (p < 0.05). In addition, extrapolating and analyzing FA XYZ direction samplings for each patient and each control, we found that this result was due to a stronger decrement of FA values along the Y axis (antero-posterior direction) (p < 0.01); FA changes along X and Z axes were not statistically significant (p > 0.05). We confirmed also no statistically significant differences of FA and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) for cerebellar peduncles in PD patients compared to healthy controls.

Conclusions

The DTI-based cerebellar abnormalities in PD could constitute an advance in the knowledge of this disease. We demonstrated a statistically significant reduction of FA in cerebellar hemispheres of PD patients compared to healthy controls. Our work also demonstrated that the use of more sophisticated approaches in the DTI parameter analysis could potentially have a clinical relevance.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, for the helpful collaboration.

Ethical standards and patient consent

We declare that all human studies have been approved by our Ethics Committee and have therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. We declare that all patients gave informed consent prior to inclusion in this study.

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Science and Morphological and Functional Images, University of Messina, via Consolare Valeria, 1 c/o A.O.U. Policlinico “G. Martino”, 98125, Messina, Italy

    Enricomaria Mormina, Alessandro Arrigo, Francesca Granata, Demetrio Milardi, Giuseppe P. Anastasi & Michele Gaeta

  2. Department of Neurosciences, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Calamuneri & Angelo Quartarone

  3. Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY, USA

    Maria F. Ghilardi, Matilde Inglese & Alessandro Di Rocco

  4. IRCCS Centro Neurolesi Bonino Pulejo, Messina, Italy

    Demetrio Milardi

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  1. Enricomaria Mormina
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alessandro Arrigo.

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Mormina, E., Arrigo, A., Calamuneri, A. et al. Diffusion tensor imaging parameters’ changes of cerebellar hemispheres in Parkinson’s disease. Neuroradiology 57, 327–334 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00234-014-1473-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00234-014-1473-5

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