Journal
NEUROIMAGE
Volume 49, Issue 1, Pages 141-149Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.07.050
Keywords
Corpus Callosum; Mild AD; Severe AD; Amnesic MCI; Region-of-interest; Voxel-based morphometry
Funding
- Italian Ministry of Health [RC 06-07-08-09, RF 06-07-08]
- National Institutes of Health [U54 RR021813, P41 RR013642, R01 EB008281, M01 RR-000865, EB007813,, P50 AG016570]
- NATIONAL CENTER FOR RESEARCH RESOURCES [U54RR021813, P41RR013642, M01RR000865] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL IMAGING AND BIOENGINEERING [R01EB007813, R01EB008281] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING [P50AG016570] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that mainly affects grey matter (GM). Nevertheless, a number of investigations have documented white matter (WM) pathology associated with AD. The corpus callosum (CC) is the largest WM fiber bundle in the human brain. It has been shown to be susceptible to atrophy in AD mainly as a correlate of Wallerian degeneration of commissural nerve fibers of the neocortex. The aim of this study was to investigate which callosal regions are affected and whether callosal degeneration is associated with the stage of the disease. For this purpose, we analyzed high-resolution MRI data of patients with amnesic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (n = 20), mild AD (n = 20), severe AD (n = 10), and of healthy controls (n = 20). Callosal morphology was investigated applying two different structural techniques: mesh-based geometrical modeling methods and whole-brain voxel-based analyses. Our findings indicate significant reductions in severe AD patients compared to healthy controls in anterior (genu and anterior body) and posterior (splenium) sections. In contrast, differences between healthy controls and mild AD patients or amnesic MCI patients were less pronounced and did not survive corrections for multiple comparisons. When correlating anterior and posterior WM density of the CC with GM density of the cortex in the severe AD group, we detected significant positive relationships between posterior sections of the CC and the cortex. We conclude that callosal atrophy is present predominantly in the latest stage of AD, where two mechanisms might contribute to WM alterations in severe AD: the Wallerian degeneration in posterior Subregions and the myelin breakdown process in anterior subregions. (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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