Index by author

These authors sought to characterize white matter lesions of elderly adults and determine if some were artifacts. Using FLAIR they imaged 665 subjects without dementia, carefully measured and evaluated periventricular white matter lesions, and correlated these with several aspects of cardiovascular disease. They concluded that periventricular white matter hyperintensity levels, distribution, and association with risk factors and disease suggest that in old age, these are true tissue abnormalities and therefore should not be dismissed as artifacts.

Healthy individuals who either had no relatives with multiple sclerosis or had a family history of it were studied and evaluated according the Okuda and Swanton criteria for radiologically isolated syndrome. These investigators found that the frequency of white matter signal abnormalities and radiologically isolated syndrome were higher in the healthy relatives of patients with multiple sclerosis compared with nonfamilial healthy control subjects. In healthy relatives of patients with MS, smoking and obesity also contributed to the presence of white matter lesions.