Structural Imaging and Parkinson's Disease: Moving Toward Quantitative Markers of Disease Progression.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive age-related neurodegenerative disorder. Although the pathological hallmark of PD is dopaminergic cell death in the substantia nigra pars compacta, widespread neurodegenerative changes occur throughout the brain as disease progresses. Postmortem studies, for example, have demonstrated the presence of Lewy pathology, apoptosis, and loss of neurotransmitters and interneurons in both cortical and subcortical regions of PD patients. Many in vivo structural imaging studies have attempted to gauge PD-related pathology, particularly in gray matter, with the hope of identifying an imaging biomarker. Reports of brain atrophy in PD, however, have been inconsistent, most likely due to differences in the studied populations (i.e. different disease stages and/or clinical subtypes), experimental designs (i.e. cross-sectional vs. longitudinal), and image analysis methodologies (i.e. automatic vs. manual segmentation). This review attempts to summarize the current state of gray matter structural imaging research in PD in relationship to disease progression, reconciling some of the differences in reported results, and to identify challenges and future avenues.
Department of Neurology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.
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Sterling
Department of Neurology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.|Department of Pharmacology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.
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Lewis
Department of Neurology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.
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Department of Neurology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.|Department of Pharmacology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.|Department of Radiology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.|Department of Neurosurgery, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.|Department of Kinesiology, Pennsylvania State University-Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, PA, USA.
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Huang
D018450:Disease Progression; D066128:Gray Matter / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000473:pathology*
MRI; Parkinson’s disease; review; structure