European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

Background: MRI has been considered as an important radiological non-invasive diagnostic tool in inflammatory demyelinating diseases that helps in early intervention to slow its progression. Lack of data in the current study setting and the fact that, most information on these inflammatory demyelinating disorders come from hospital based cross-sectional studies, this study was conducted.
Aims: To describe the characteristics of inflammatory demyelinating brain lesions on Magnetic Resonance imaging
Methods and Material: A cross sectional study was conducted among fourty clinico-radiologically suspected inflammatory demyelinating diseases i.e. multiple sclerosis (MS), neuromyelitis optica (NMO) and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) in the department of radiodiagnosis in collaboration with the department of neurology, VMMC and Safdarjung hospital, New Delhi. MRI was acquired in different imaging sequences among all the patients and the lesions were described. All the data were expressed in means or proportions based on the type of data and analysis was done using Microsoft Excel.
Results: A total of 24 were having MS, 2 had NMO and 14 had ADEM. Most of the lesions in MS (70.8%) and ADEM (78.6%) were supratentorial. Higher proportions of MS showed hyperintense lesions (84.3% vs 72.7%), contrast enhancement lesions (74.5% vs 54.4%) and false diffusion restriction (76.5% vs 9.1%) compared to ADEM. However, most of the patients with ADEM showed true diffusion restriction (63.6% vs 7.8%) compared to MS.
Conclusions: Hyperintense and contrast enhancement lesions were more common in MS and true diffusion restriction lesions were mostly ADEM lesions.