High-resolution connectivity of the basal ganglia in health & disease
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Imaging of the human basal ganglia in health and disease using high resolution MRI.
IRAS ID
134517
Contact name
Gwenaëlle Douaud
Contact email
Research summary
Summary of Research
In Parkinson’s disease (PD), all your movements become slow, restrained, your body seems resistant to your commands and, over 10 to 15 years, your body inexorably slows to an almost complete freeze. In Huntington’s disease (HD), a rare, lethal genetic condition with no treatment to date, your body makes violent movements against your will, your arms suddenly dancing in the air, your face grimacing…
You might think that these are two very different, opposite even, diseases. But both PD and HD – what clinicians call “movement disorders” – are actually caused by damage to a group of minuscule structures in your brain called the “basal ganglia”. This group of structures forms a very complex system that controls how we move. And we know that the sequence in which these brain regions are used matters: whereas one sequence might decrease the movement of your hand, another, using exactly the same structures but in a different order, might increase it.
High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows us to look through the skull inside the human brain and make those minuscule structures visible. It can reveal how different parts of the brain are interacting: wiring together (using “diffusion imaging”) or functioning together (using “functional imaging”).
For our MRC-funded study at the FMRIB Centre, we will therefore use our high-resolution MRI scanner to get images from healthy people, as well as PD and HD patients, and we will repeat the scan two years apart. We will identify all the existing connections between all the different parts of the basal ganglia, identify the sequences in which these various parts are used, and finally look at the (ever increasing) impact of PD and HD on the wiring and functioning of the basal ganglia, to understand for example how the brain can compensate for the degeneration of these structures.
Summary of Results
We used ultra high field 7T MRI scanner to investigate differences in the brain of Huntington's (HD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) participants at a very early stage of the disease. We compared them with healthy controls of the same age. We found that, in very tiny structures in the brain, HD and PD participants show an opposite pattern of brain activity, while in some other parts of the brain, they show the same pattern. These results are associated, respectively, with the opposite and with the common (motor) symptoms seen in HD and PD. This is the first time that this type of activity can be seen, non-invasively, in such small parts of the brain, thanks to the ultra high field MRI scanner.
REC name
South Central - Oxford A Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/SC/0168
Date of REC Opinion
16 Apr 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion