Pragmatic approach to muscle MRI biomarkers in motor neuron disease

A rapid whole body muscle MRI protocol is sensitive to disease progression in motor neuron disease.

As part of the evolution of neuromuscular medicine, there has been a move towards tools that can objectively measure change in the disease without relying on relatively insensitive or subjective clinical measures. Motor neuron disease (MND) has a wide array of potential clinical phenotypes and disease progression can be unpredictable between individuals.1 Clinical instruments to measure MND have well-defined limitations.2 3 For these reasons, it is necessary to develop objective non-clinical measures of disease progression in MND.

In their JNNP paper, Dr Jenkins and colleagues have advanced muscle MRI as a potential biomarker of MND progression.4 The authors performed whole body T2-weighted imaging on a cohort of patients with MND and demonstrated an increase in muscle T2 signal over a 4-month observation period and a correlation between muscle...

from #ORL-AlexandrosSfakianakis via ola Kala on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2Cx6cGR