Differences in Mean Diffusivity values in the Corona Radiata between patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and Healthy Controls

Our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is at an all time high. Despite the progress being made, AD is currently irreversible and the number of confirmed cases continues to grow world wide. There is a need for deeper understanding of the course of Alzheimer’s and the development of more sensitive diagnostic tools. In the present study, we performedDTI and TBSS analyses of the Corona Radiata (CR) and Uncinate Fasciculus (UF) in the brain. We extracted MD and FA values of 10 AD patients and compared them to 16 healthy controls using ENIGMA DTI protocol. We also analyzed the Mini-mental state examination (MMSE) scores of each subject. We predict that patients with AD will have lower FA scores and higher MD values compared to healthy controls. We also predict that higher MD scores will be predictive of lower MMSE scores. The results indicate a significant difference in MD values in the CR between groups, which indicates greater axonal necrosis in the CR in patients with AD. However, FA values were not different between groups and patients with higher MD values did not have lower MMSE scores.These results indicate that axonal necrosis in the CR does not have a significant effect on executive functioning as measured by the MMSE. However, these results provide support to the notion of using DTI methodologies as a means of diagnosing AD.