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We investigated the ability of cortical and subcortical gray matter (GM) atrophy in combination with white matter (WM) integrity to distinguish behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and from controls using voxel-based morphometry, subcortical structure segmentation, and tract-based spatial statistics. To determine which combination of MR markers differentiated the three groups with the highest accuracy, we conducted discriminant function analyses. Adjusted for age, sex and center, both types of dementia had more GM atrophy, lower fractional anisotropy (FA) and higher mean (MD), axial (L1) and radial diffusivity (L23) values than controls. BvFTD patients had more GM atrophy in orbitofrontal and inferior frontal areas than AD patients. In addition, caudate nucleus and nucleus accumbens were smaller in bvFTD than in AD. FA values were lower; MD, L1 and L23 values were higher, especially in frontal areas of the brain for bvFTD compared to AD patients. The combination of cortical GM, hippocampal volume and WM integrity measurements, classified 97–100% of controls, 81–100% of AD and 67–75% of bvFTD patients correctly. Our results suggest that WM integrity measures add complementary information to measures of GM atrophy, thereby improving the classification between AD and bvFTD.

Homocysteine (Hcy) is a vascular risk factor associated with cognitive impairment and cerebrovascular disease but has also been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Using multivariate Scaled Subprofile Model (SSM) analysis, we sought to identify a network pattern in structural neuroimaging reflecting the regionally distributed association of plasma Hcy with subcortical gray matter (SGM) volumes and its relation to other health risk factors and cognition in 160 healthy older adults, ages 50-89. We identified an SSM Hcy-SGM pattern that was characterized by bilateral hippocampal and nucleus accumbens volume reductions with relative volume increases in bilateral caudate, pallidum, and putamen. Greater Hcy-SGM pattern expression was associated with greater white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume, older age, and male sex, but not with other vascular and AD-related risk factors. Mediation analyses revealed that age predicted WMH volume, which predicted Hcy-SGM pattern expression, which, in turn, predicted cognitive processing speed performance. These findings suggest that the multivariate SSM Hcy-SGM pattern may be indicative of cognitive aging, reflecting a potential link between vascular health and cognitive dysfunction in healthy older adults., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: To investigate the gray matter (GM) atrophy in Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) using T1-weighted Fluid-Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) images based on voxel based morphometry (VBM) method., Materials and Methods: In this study, we firstly modified the conventional VBM method to make it can process the T1-weighted FLAIR brain images. Then, we used this method on the 24 PSP patients and 23 healthy age- and sex-matched control subjects to find the local gray matter density changes of PSP patients., Results: Compared with healthy controls, GM reductions of PSP patients mainly located in the thalamus, basal ganglia, pons, midbrain, insular cortex, frontal cortex, temporal lobe, cerebellum, cingulate cortex and hippocampus., Conclusion: We used the modified VBM technique into T1 FLAIR data to study the brain gray matter atrophy in PSP, and found some new atrophy areas, including pallidum, middle and posterior cingulum, lingual, fusiform gyrus and the post part of inferior temporal gyrus. These areas have not been described in the former VBM studies, but they revealed abnormity in the pathologic and other studies on PSP. Our results might be expected to provide significant underlining neurology information and diagnostic value for PSP., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)