• Giuseppe Bomboi, Vasiliki N Ikonomidou, Stefano Pellegrini, Susan K Stern, Antonio Gallo, Sungyoung Auh, Iordanis E Evangelou, Jhalak Agarwal, Clelia Pellicano, Joan M Ohayon, Fredric K Cantor, Mary Ehrmantraut, Henry F McFarland, Robert L Kane, and Francesca Bagnato.
• Neuroimmunology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892-1400, USA.
• J Neuroimaging. 2011 Apr 1;21(2):e57-63.

Background And PurposeUsing high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we investigated the relationships between white matter (WM) lesion volume (LV), normal-appearing WM (NAWM) normalized volume, WM-lesion and NAWM magnetization transfer ratios (MTRs), brain parenchyma fraction (BPF), and cognitive impairment (CI) in multiple sclerosis (MS).MethodsTwenty-four patients and 24 healthy volunteers (age, sex, and years of education-matched) underwent a 3.0 Tesla (3T) scan and evaluation of depression, fatigue, and CI using the Minimal Assessment of Cognitive Function in MS (MACFIMS) battery.ResultsIn this clinically relatively well-preserved cohort of patients (median score on the Expanded Disability Status Scale=1.5), CI was detected on Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), California Verbal Learning Test-II (CVLT-II), and Controlled Oral Word Association Test. MT data were available in 19 pairs on whom correlation analyses were performed. Associations were seen between SDMT and normalized NAWM volume (P=.034, r=.502), CVLT-II long delay and normalized NAWM volume (P=.012, r=.563), WM-LV (P=.024, r=.514), and BPF (P=.002, r=.666).ConclusionsThe use of 3T MRI in a sample of clinically stable MS patients shows the importance of WM disease in hampering processing speed and word retrieval.Copyright © 2010 by the American Society of Neuroimaging.

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