Abstract
Linear measures of cerebral ventricular enlargement may act as surrogate measures of cerebral atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS). Linear atrophy markers were measured from routine MRI scans during a population survey of 171 Tasmanian MS patients and 91 healthy controls. Thirty-five Victorian MS clinic patients were recruited as a validation cohort with 14 of these re-assessed 4 years later. In the population survey, we measured three linear brain atrophy markers: inter-caudate distance (ICD), third ventricle width (TVW) and frontal horn width (FHW). TVW (OR 2.0, p = 0.001) and ICD (OR 16.1, p < 0.001) differentiated between MS cases and controls. In the validation study, we correlated the intercaudate ratio (ICR = ICD/brain width) and third ventricular ratio (TVR = TVW/brain width) with brain parenchymal volume. Cross-sectionally, ICR ( R = −0.453, p < 0.01) and TVR ( R = −0.653, p < 0.01) were correlated with brain parenchymal volume. Longitudinally, brain parenchymal volume loss was inversely correlated with increased ICD ( R = −0.77, p < 0.01) and TVW ( R = −0.71, p < 0.01). This study shows that ICD measurements obtained from clinical MRI scans are valid brain atrophy measures for use in monitoring MS progression.
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