summary: MS is an inflammatory-demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). However, other demyelinating diseases also affect the CNS. Differentiation between MS and other diseases is crucial because of differences in prognosis and treatment. This differentiation is not always straightforward because clinical features of these diseases may overlap with those of MS. Conventional MRI techniques may show similar patterns of brain damage for MS and for the other diseases. The authors aimed to compare the brains of normal appearance (the brain tissue outside the lesions) of people with MS with the normal-appearing brains of people with other diseases affecting the CNS. They used a relatively new MRI technique diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), which examines the ability of water to spread through brain tissue. The group of people with MS had higher levels of water diffusion, indicating a higher degree of damage, than the other groups, but only in a specific part of the white matter of the brain, the corpus callosum, which is a crucial structure of the brain which contains white matter fibres to connect the two hemispheres. The authors suggest that DWI may be a useful tool to differentiate MS from other diseases affecting the CNS.

authors: Straus Farber R, Devilliers L, Miller A, Lublin F, Law M, Fatterpekar G, Delman B, Naidich T

source: J Magn Reson Imaging. 2009 Sep 28;30(4):732-736

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