Thin skin

Abstract

Three structural MRI techniques have been developed in recent years to study patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer disease (AD): MRI volumetry,1 voxel-based morphometry (VBM),2 and surface-based morphometry (SBM).3 Since patients with amnestic MCI progress to AD at a rate of approximately 12% per year,4 the aim of many of these studies has been to identify quantitative structural measures (e.g., ventricular volume, whole-brain volume, hippocampal/entorhinal cortical volume, cortical thickness) that accurately predict the progression of amnestic MCI to AD and can therefore serve as surrogate markers of disease progression in therapeutic trials.] In this issue of Neurology ®, Bakkour et al.5 describe the use of structural MRI and FreeSurfer-generated estimates of cortical thickness6 to determine 1) if a quantifiable in vivo cortical signature of AD-related thinning is present in patients with questionable dementia (QAD, defined as Clinical Dementia Rating [CDR] = 0.5), 2) if …