Wednesday, December 2 | 3:40 p.m.-3:50 p.m. | W7-SSNR12-5 | Room S502
In this Wednesday afternoon session, researchers will share data from a study that found that monitoring changes in tissue magnetic susceptibility over time helps detect aging-related brain tissue alterations associated with neurodegenerative vulnerability.
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is sensitive to tissue magnetic susceptibility changes associated with iron accumulation and myelin alteration, according to presenter Rasheed Abid of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and colleagues.
The group noted that, "while prior studies have reported cross-sectional susceptibility differences across aging populations, longitudinal whole-brain susceptibility changes in older adults remain insufficiently characterized," which prompted the team to conduct a study that would assess longitudinal trajectories and distributional changes of whole-brain magnetic susceptibility in older adults using repeated QSM image acquisitions.
The research included 255 adults who underwent 764 multi-echo 3D gradient-echo MRI exams (mean interval between scans, 1.48 years) performed on two 3-tesla scanners. The team reconstructed magnetic susceptibility maps using the Morphology Enabled Dipole Inversion (MEDI) iterative reconstruction algorithm.
It found that whole-brain magnetic susceptibility showed a positive longitudinal association with age (p < 0.05), and that longitudinal trajectories showed gradual increases in susceptibility across repeated visits among the study participants.
"These findings are consistent with diffuse aging-related tissue changes, including iron accumulation and/or myelin alteration, and support the potential role of longitudinal QSM as an imaging biomarker for late-life brain aging and neurodegenerative vulnerability," Abid and colleagues concluded.
