Cross-sectional and longitudinal medial temporal lobe subregional atrophy patterns in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia

Abstract

T1-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies report early atrophy in the left anterior temporal lobe, especially the perirhinal cortex, in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). Improved segmentation protocols using high-resolution T2-MRI have enabled fine-grained medial temporal lobe (MTL) subregional measurements, which may provide novel information on the atrophy pattern and disease progression in svPPA. We aimed to investigate the MTL subregional atrophy pattern cross-sectionally and longitudinally in patients with svPPA as compared with controls and patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). MTL subregional volumes were obtained using the Automated Segmentation for Hippocampal Subfields software from high-resolution T2-MRIs in 15 svPPA, 37 AD, and 23 healthy controls. All MTL volumes were corrected for intracranial volume and parahippocampal cortices for slice number. Longitudinal atrophy rates of all subregions were obtained using an unbiased deformation-based morphometry pipeline in 6 svPPA patients, 9 controls, and 12 AD patients. Cross-sectionally, significant volume loss was observed in svPPA compared with controls in the left MTL, right cornu ammonis 1 (CA1), Brodmann area (BA)35, and BA36 (subdivisions of the perirhinal cortex). Compared with AD patients, svPPA patients had significantly smaller left CA1, BA35, and left and right BA36 volumes. Longitudinally, svPPA patients had significantly greater atrophy rates of left and right BA36 than controls but not relative to AD patients. Fine-grained analysis of MTL atrophy patterns provides information about the evolution of atrophy in svPPA. These results indicate that MTL subregional measures might be useful markers to track disease progression or for clinical trials in svPPA.