%0 Journal Article
%T Early microstructural white matter changes in patients with HIV: A diffusion tensor imaging study
%A Bianca Stubbe-Dr£żger
%A Michael Deppe
%A Siawoosh Mohammadia
%A Simon S Keller
%A Harald Kugel
%A Nora Gregor
%A Stefan Evers
%A Peter Young
%A E-Bernd Ringelstein
%A Gabriele Arendt
%A Stefan Knecht
%A Ingo W Husstedt
%J BMC Neurology
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2377-12-23
%X We compared diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) derived WM fractional anisotropy (FA) between HIV-patients with and without mild macroscopic brain lesions determined using standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We furthermore investigated whether WM alterations co-occurred with neurocognitive deficits and depression. We performed structural MRI and DTI for 19 patients and 19 age-matched healthy controls. Regionally-specific WM integrity was investigated using voxel-based statistics of whole-brain FA maps and region-of-interest analysis. Each patient underwent laboratory and neuropsychological tests.Structural MRI revealed no lesions in twelve (HIV-MRN) and unspecific mild macrostructural lesions in seven patients (HIV-MRL). Both analyses revealed widespread FA-alterations in all patients. Patients with HIV-MRL had FA-alterations primarily adjacent to the observed lesions and, whilst reduced in extent, patients with HIV-MRN also exhibited FA-alterations in similar regions. Patients with evidence of depression showed FA-increase in the ventral tegmental area, pallidum and nucleus accumbens in both hemispheres, and patients with evidence of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder showed widespread FA-reduction.These results show that patients with HIV-MRN have evidence of FA-alterations in similar regions that are lesioned in HIV-MRL patients, suggesting common neuropathological processes. Furthermore, they suggest a biological rather than a reactive origin of depression in HIV-patients.
%K Depression
%K HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder
%K Fractional anisotropy
%K Neuropsychology
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2377/12/23/abstract