MRS Has Potential for Early Detection of Degenerative Brain Disorders

A team of U.S. scientists claims that a new way to test for neurologic diseases could provide clinicians with a fast and noninvasive method of diagnosing degenerative disorders. The research showed that magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can differentiate between different disorders in patients, allowing an earlier diagnosis.

The diagnosis of neurologic degenerative disorders such as Huntington's disease remains a difficult clinical task and while modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can reveal loss of brain tissue, until now no diagnostic testing methods could help distinguish between Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, or Parkinson's disease effectively.

"We discovered that MRS can reliably identify brain pathology in Huntington disease model mice by measuring 17 different brain metabolites at the same time,” said project leader Dr. Jason B. Nikas, from the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, USA). "This technology, if expanded to humans and applied to a range of neurological disorders, could potentially provide diagnostic information to distinguish different causes of dementia and other forms of neurological illness, rapidly and noninvasively, with current generation MR scanners.”

MRI and MRS both work by applying a magnetic field to a biologic tissue, and then perturbing it with a radio-frequency (RF) signal, certain types of atoms in the tissue will give a response that can be detected externally. MRI is based upon the response of hydrogen atoms in water molecules in the tissue; however, MRS can quantify the amounts of complex biological molecules in tissue.

Dr. Nikas and colleagues measured the amounts of 17 different biochemical compounds in the brains of mice and discovered that the Huntington mutation R6/2 caused a signature change in the levels of these substances. This allowed the team to identify successfully, which mice had the mutation, 100% of the time, by noninvasive MRS.

This modality has huge implications both for neuroscience and for clinical neurology, according to the investigators. For patients with clinical syndromes that are tricky to diagnose, such as the cause of a dementia-related disorder, MRS might be able to identify signature "MR fingerprints” of certain diseases, leading to rapid, noninvasive diagnosis.

"Scanning animals noninvasively by MRS could be useful in the monitoring of various interventions in mice with genetic disorders,” concluded Dr. Nikas. "However, it could be even more valuable for identifying human subjects who were asymptomatic, but showed the MRS signature of a particular disease, which they might develop years later; moreover, it could be very valuable in assessing disease progression and/or the efficacy of an applied medical treatment.”

The study's findings were published in published online March 23, 2010, and in October 5, 2010, issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

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