Abstract
Quantitative evaluation of brainstem on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was conducted in patients with neuro-Behçet’s disease (NB) in order to delineate the differences in the pathogenesis of acute NB and chronic progressive NB. Areas of the mesencephalic tegmentum and pons were measured on sagittal sections of T1-weightened images of MRI using Advantage Workstation ver 3.0 software in 9 patients with acute NB, 14 patients with chronic progressive NB, and 46 age-and sex-matched control patients with non-Behçet’s neurological complications. Areas of the mesencephalic tegmentum (acute NB: 135.11±24.29 mm²［mean±SD］, chronic progressive NB: 98. 64±24.40mm², control: 143.64±21.70 mm²) as well as those of the pons (acute NB: 490.11±97.00 mm², chronic progressive NB: 395.71±88.90 mm², control: 526.97±50.74 mm²) were decreased significantly in chronic progressive NB compared with acute NB and control, whereas there were no significant differences between acute NB and control. In chronic progressive NB, the reduction of the brainstem areas tended to be correlated with the duration of the disease, although it did not reached the statistical significance. These results confirm that brainstem atrophy is more prominent in chronic progressive NB than in acute NB. Moreover, the data suggest that quantitative analysis of brainstem areas might be useful for early diagnosis as well as for evaluation of the disease activity in chronic progressive NB.
