Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wiegertjes, Kim
• Chan, Kwok-Shing
• Telgte, Annemieke ter
• Gesierich, Benno
• Norris, David G
• Klijn, Catharina JM
• Duering, Marco
• Tuladhar, Anil M
• Marques, José P
• Leeuw, Frank-Erik de

Titel

Assessing cortical cerebral microinfarcts on iron-sensitive MRI in cerebral small vessel disease

Ist Teil von

• Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism, 2021-12, Vol.41 (12), p.3391-3399

Ort / Verlag

London, England: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Recent studies suggest that a subset of cortical microinfarcts may be identifiable on T2* but invisible on T1 and T2 follow-up images. We aimed to investigate whether cortical microinfarcts are associated with iron accumulation after the acute stage. The RUN DMC – InTENse study is a serial MRI study including individuals with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD). 54 Participants underwent 10 monthly 3 T MRIs, including diffusion-weighted imaging, quantitative R1 (=1/T1), R2 (=1/T2), and R2* (=1/T2*) mapping, from which MRI parameters within areas corresponding to microinfarcts and control region of interests (ROIs) were retrieved within 16 participants. Finally, we compared pre- and post-lesional values with repeated measures ANOVA and post-hoc paired t-tests using the mean difference between lesion and control ROI values. We observed 21 acute cortical microinfarcts in 7 of the 54 participants (median age 69 years [IQR 66–74], 63% male). R2* maps demonstrated an increase in R2* values at the moment of the last available follow-up MRI (median [IQR], 5 [5–14] weeks after infarction) relative to prelesional values (p = .08), indicative of iron accumulation. Our data suggest that cortical microinfarcts are associated with increased R2* values, indicative of iron accumulation, possibly due to microhemorrhages, neuroinflammation or neurodegeneration, awaiting histopathological verification.