Periventricular lucencies in the CT scans of aged and demented patients.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C Gentes.
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A group of 35 patients with presumptive diagnosis of Alzheimer disease and 29 normal volunteer spouse controls, all over the age of 60, underwent medical and neurologic evaluation, an extensive psychometric battery, and CT scanning. CT ventricular volume was derived for each CT section by algorithm summation of the number of pixels within a user-defined cerebrospinal fluid range. Composite ventricular volume for each patient, obtained by summation of the individual section ventricular volumes, was corrected for brain size by dividing by the sum of the five largest brain section volumes. For the normal group, composite ventricular volume thus derived was 5.2% and for the impaired group 7.5%; the 44% difference was significant (p less than .009). Increasing ventricular volume was significantly associated with increasing severity of cognitive impairment (p less than .05).
In this study the positron emission tomographic (PET)-18F-2-deoxy-2-fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) technique was used to study both normal aging and senile dementia. The results derived from 15 young normal subjects (mean age, 26 +/- 5 years) and 22 elderly normal subjects (mean age, 66 +/- 7 years) failed to indicate significant metabolic changes associated with age. A group of 24 patients with senile dementia (mean age, 73 +/- 7 years) showed consistent diminutions in regional glucose use relative to the elderly normals. Across all brain regions the diminutions were 17%-24%. There were also significant correlations between the measures of glucose use and the measures of cognitive functioning. Discriminant function classification analysis results indicate that better than 80% classification accuracy can be achieved for individual PET measures. These data suggest a possible future diagnostic use of PET in senile dementia.