FPCIT SPECT in parkinsonism predicts survival: a data-driven analysis

1488Introduction: Dopamine transporter SPECT is an established method to investigate nigrostriatal integrity in case of clinically uncertain parkinsonism. The present study investigated whether a completely data-driven analysis of FPCIT SPECT is able to stratify patients according to mortality risk. This was tested in a clinical patient sample. Patients from our clinical registry were included if they had received FPCIT SPECT between 10/2008 and 06/2016 for diagnosis of parkinsonism and if their vital status (alive or date of death, if applicable) could be determined in 07/2017. Atlas-based regions of interest were used to extract individual specific binding ratios (SBR; occipital cortex as reference) of the whole striatum and striatal subregions (caudate nucleus, anterior and posterior putamen) of both hemispheres. SBR of the whole striatum, its asymmetry (asymmetry index, AI; absolute value), and the rostrocaudal gradient of striatal binding (C/pP: caudate SBR divided by posterior putamen SBR) were used as input for hierarchical clustering of patients into subgroups. A Cox proportional hazards model was computed in order to test whether survival (adjusted for age) was different between the subgroups. Vital status could be determined in 518/566 patients. 77/518 patients had died within the median follow-up duration of 3.3 years (95% C.I. 3.1 to 3.7). The subgroups identified by hierarchical clustering were characterized by relatively (1) high SBR, low AI, and low C/pP,(2) lo...
Source: Journal of Nuclear Medicine - Category: Nuclear Medicine Authors: Tags: Neurology & amp; Psychiatry Imaging Posters Source Type: research