• Lidia Glodzik, Henry Rusinek, Jinyu Li, Cyrus Zhou, Wai Tsui, Lisa Mosconi, Yi Li, Ricardo Osorio, Schantel Williams, Catherine Randall, Nicole Spector, Pauline McHugh, John Murray, Elizabeth Pirraglia, Shankar Vallabhajolusa, and Mony de Leon.
• Center for Brain Health, Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, 145 East 32nd Street, New York, NY, 10016, USA, Lidia.Glodzik@nyumc.org.
• Eur. J. Nucl. Med. Mol. Imaging. 2015 Jan 1; 42 (1): 97-102.

PurposeOne of the interesting features of the amyloid tracer Pittsburgh compound B (PiB) is that it generates a signal in the white matter (WM) in both healthy subjects and cognitively impaired individuals. This characteristic gave rise to the possibility that PiB could be used to trace WM pathology. In a group of cognitively healthy elderly we examined PiB retention in normal-appearing WM (NAWM) and WM lesions (WML), one of the most common brain pathologies in aging.MethodsWe segmented WML and NAWM on fluid attenuation inversion recovery (FLAIR) images of 73 subjects (age 61.9 ± 10.0, 71 % women). PiB PET images were corrected for partial volume effects and coregistered to FLAIR images and WM masks. WML and NAWM PiB signals were then extracted.ResultsPiB retention in WML was lower than in NAWM (p < 0.001, 14.6 % reduction). This was true both for periventricular WML (p < 0.001, 17.8 % reduction) and deep WML (p = 0.001, 7.5 % reduction).ConclusionPiB binding in WM is influenced by the presence of WML, which lower the signal. Our findings add to the growing evidence that PiB can depict WM pathology and should prompt further investigations into PiB binding targets in WM.

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