Neocortical morphometry in Huntington's disease:Indication of the coexistence of abnormal neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative processes

Publication date: Available online 13 February 2020Source: NeuroImage: ClinicalAuthor(s): Jean-Francois Mangin, Denis Rivière, Edouard Duchesnay, Yann Cointepas, Véronique Gaura, Christophe Verny, Philippe Damier, Pierre Krystkowiak, Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi, Philippe Hantraye, Philippe Remy, Gwenaëlle DouaudAbstractHuntington's disease (HD) is an inherited, autosomal dominant disorder that is characteristically thought of as a degenerative disorder. Despite cellular and molecular grounds suggesting HD could also impact normal development, there has been scarce systems-level data obtained from in vivo human studies supporting this hypothesis. Sulcus-specific morphometry analysis may help disentangle the contribution of coexisting neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental processes, but such an approach has never been used in HD. Here, we investigated cortical sulcal depth, related to degenerative process, as well as cortical sulcal length, related to developmental process, in early-stage HD and age-matched healthy controls. This morphometric analysis revealed significant differences in the HD participants compared with the healthy controls bilaterally in the central and intra-parietal sulcus, but also in the left intermediate frontal sulcus and calcarine fissure. As the primary visual cortex is not connected to the striatum, the latter result adds to the increasing in vivo evidence for primary cortical degeneration in HD. Those sulcal measures that differed between HD a...
Source: NeuroImage: Clinical - Category: Radiology Source Type: research