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Structural differences in impaired verbal fluency in essential tremor patients compared to healthy controls
OBJECTIVE: We wanted to identify differences in grey and white matter in essential tremor patients compared to controls in the non‐motor domain, using the example of impaired verbal fluency. BACKGROUND: A disturbance of verbal fluency in essential tremor patients compared to healthy controls is beha...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5516598/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28729930 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/brb3.722 |
Sumario: | OBJECTIVE: We wanted to identify differences in grey and white matter in essential tremor patients compared to controls in the non‐motor domain, using the example of impaired verbal fluency. BACKGROUND: A disturbance of verbal fluency in essential tremor patients compared to healthy controls is behaviorally well described. METHODS: Voxel‐based morphometry and tract‐based spatial statistics were used to analyze structural differences in grey and white matter in 19 essential tremor patients compared to 23 age‐ and gender‐matched controls. RESULTS: Several significant observations were made. (I) There was less grey matter in the predominantly right precuneus in the essential tremor group compared to controls [p < .001]. (II) In ET patients mean, axial, and radial diffusivity values broadly correlated with the tremor rating scale, pronounced in fronto‐parietal regions [p < .05]. (III) In ET patients there was a significant decline in fractional anisotropy values in the corpus callosum in the correlation with verbal fluency results [p < .05]; by inclusion of the tremor rating scale as covariate of no interest this significance was however diminished to a tendency (p < .1). No significant results were found in these within‐group correlations in grey matter analyses for ET patients (p > .05). CONCLUSION: The present results indicate that non‐motor symptoms such as verbal fluency (VBF) in ET have a structural substrate; their reproduction requires the integration of potential environmental plasticity effects, differentiation into individual clinical subtypes and a careful handling with methodological peculiarities of structural MR imaging. |
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