White Matter Structural Integrity and Trans-Cranial Doppler Blood Flow Pulsatility in Normal Aging

Cerebrovascular diseases underlie many forms of age-related cognitive impairment and the mechanism linking the two is hypothesized to involve adverse changes in white matter (WM) integrity. Despite being systemic, small vessel disease does not uniformly affect WM. We performed voxel-wise analysis of MRI images to examine the association between fractional anisotropy (FA) — a diffusion tensor measure of WM structural integrity — and pulsatility index (PI) — a transcranial Doppler ultrasound measure of abnormal arterial flow — in adults over the age of 70 years who were free of stroke and dementia.

Source: Magnetic Resonance Imaging - November 20, 2017 Category: Radiology Authors: Roman Fleysher, Michael L Lipton, Olga Noskin, Tatjana Rundek, Richard Lipton, Carol A. Derby Source Type: research