Transcranial sonography: Brazilian experience

Abstract

entitled “Transcranial sonography as a diagnostic tool for Parkinson’s disease”. These authors aimed to establish the per-centage of subjects with adequated temporal bone windows for transcranial sonography (TCS) studies and also to revisit in a Brazilian sample the hypothesis that increased echogenic size of substantia nigra (SN) might distinguish Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients from healthy individuals. We would like to congratu -late the authors for the original idea to assess the Brazilian sub -jects with a case-control study. The authors found that 10.8% of the subjects had insufficient temporal acoustic bone windows, which is in line with previous data. Also, they identified hyper -echogenicity of the SN in 88.2% of PD patients, against 14.2% of control group individuals. In addition, the authors pointed out that “in Brazil there is no systematic study on transcranial sonography”. Actually, this is an appropriate opportunity to report that our group has sys -tematically studied TCS findings in some neurological dis -eases, such as spinocerebellar ataxias (SCA) and restless legs syndrome (RLS) (Figure). We have recently published a study entitled “Transcranial sonography findings in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (Machado-Joseph disease): a cross sectional study”, in which we conducted TCS studies in 30 patients with clinical and molecular proven Machado-Joseph disease (MJD), and used 44 healthy subjects as control group, and found that hiperecho -genicity of the SN was more frequent in MJD patients (75%) than in the control group subjects (18%), and that brain atrophy and lenticular nucleus hyperechogenicity occurred more frequently in MJD group. Two out of 30 MJD patients were excluded from the study due to limitation of acoustic temporal bone windows