TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jende, Johann M. E.
A1  - Kender, Zoltan
A1  - Rother, Christian
A1  - Alvarez-Ramos, Lucia
A1  - Groener, Jan B.
A1  - Pham, Mirko
A1  - Morgenstern, Jakob
A1  - Oikonomou, Dimitrios
A1  - Hahn, Artur
A1  - Juerchott, Alexander
A1  - Kollmer, Jennifer
A1  - Heiland, Sabine
A1  - Kopf, Stefan
A1  - Nawroth, Peter P.
A1  - Bendszus, Martin
A1  - Kurz, Felix T.
T1  - Diabetic Polyneuropathy Is Associated With Pathomorphological Changes in Human Dorsal Root Ganglia: A Study Using 3T MR Neurography
JF  - Frontiers in Neuroscience
N2  - Diabetic neuropathy (DPN) is one of the most severe and yet most poorly understood complications of diabetes mellitus. In vivo imaging of dorsal root ganglia (DRG), a key structure for the understanding of DPN, has been restricted to animal studies. These have shown a correlation of decreased DRG volume with neuropathic symptom severity. Our objective was to investigate correlations of DRG morphology and signal characteristics at 3 Tesla (3T) magnetic resonance neurography (MRN) with clinical and serological data in diabetic patients with and without DPN. In this cross-sectional study, participants underwent 3T MRN of both L5 DRG using an isotropic 3D T2-weighted, fat-suppressed sequence with subsequent segmentation of DRG volume and analysis of normalized signal properties. Overall, 55 diabetes patients (66 ± 9 years; 32 men; 30 with DPN) took part in this study. DRG volume was smaller in patients with severe DPN when compared to patients with mild or moderate DPN (134.7 ± 21.86 vs 170.1 ± 49.22; p = 0.040). In DPN patients, DRG volume was negatively correlated with the neuropathy disability score (r = −0.43; 95%CI = −0.66 to −0.14; p = 0.02), a measure of neuropathy severity. DRG volume showed negative correlations with triglycerides (r = −0.40; 95%CI = −0.57 to −0.19; p = 0.006), and LDL cholesterol (r = −0.33; 95%CI = −0.51 to −0.11; p = 0.04). There was a strong positive correlation of normalized MR signal intensity (SI) with the neuropathy symptom score in the subgroup of patients with painful DPN (r = 0.80; 95%CI = 0.46 to 0.93; p = 0.005). DRG SI was positively correlated with HbA1c levels (r = 0.30; 95%CI = 0.09 to 0.50; p = 0.03) and the triglyceride/HDL ratio (r = 0.40; 95%CI = 0.19 to 0.57; p = 0.007). In this first in vivo study, we found DRG morphological degeneration and signal increase in correlation with neuropathy severity. This elucidates the potential importance of MR-based DRG assessments in studying structural and functional changes in DPN.
KW  - diabetic polyneuropathy
KW  - dorsal root ganglion
KW  - magnetic resonance neurography
KW  - neuropathic pain
KW  - peripheral nervous system
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-212459
VL  - 14
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kopf, Juliane
A1  - Glöckner, Stefan
A1  - Althen, Heike
A1  - Cevada, Thais
A1  - Schecklmann, Martin
A1  - Dresler, Thomas
A1  - Kittel-Schneider, Sarah
A1  - Reif, Andreas
T1  - Neural responses to a working memory task in acute depressed and remitted phases in bipolar patients
JF  - Brain Sciences
N2  - (1) Cognitive impairments such as working memory (WM) deficits are amongst the most common dysfunctions characterizing bipolar disorder (BD) patients, severely contributing to functional impairment. We aimed to investigate WM performance and associated brain activation during the acute phase of BD and to observe changes in the same patients during remission. (2) Frontal brain activation was recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during n-back task conditions (one-back, two-back and three-back) in BD patients in their acute depressive (n = 32) and remitted (n = 15) phases as well as in healthy controls (n = 30). (3) Comparison of BD patients during their acute phase with controls showed a trend (p = 0.08) towards lower dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation. In the remitted phase, BD patients showed lower dlPFC and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) activation (p = 0.02) compared to controls. No difference in dlPFC and vlPFC activation between BD patients’ phases was found. (4) Our results showed decreased working memory performance in BD patients during the working memory task in the acute phase of disease. Working memory performance improved in the remitted phase of the disease but was still particularly attenuated for the more demanding conditions.
KW  - verbal n-back
KW  - fNIRS
KW  - prefrontal cortex
KW  - cognitive deficits
KW  - bipolar disorder
KW  - remitted/acute phase
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-313509
SN  - 2076-3425
VL  - 13
IS  - 5
ER  -