New York Times: For the first time, magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) tools have been used to study the progression of
Parkinson’s disease in living patients, writes James Gorman for
the New York Times. The disease kills brain cells and causes the
affected parts of the brain to shrink. Until now, the affected
areas were buried so deep that they could only be studied in
patients who had died. Now, Suzanne Corkin at MIT and
colleagues, whose paper appears in the Archives of Neurology,
have developed a method using four different varieties of MRI to
get four different images, which they then combine into a single
image. From examining those images, the researchers determined
that it’s the substantia nigra, an area of the brain involved in
movement, that shows the first signs of damage. As the disease
progresses, it begins to affect the basal forebrain, which is
involved in memory and attention. Symptoms can vary widely,
however, among Parkinson’s patients. The new technique is just
one step along the way to under