Neuro 🧠

Dementia is a group of conditions marked by cognitive decline, memory loss and imparied thinking. The most common type is Alzheimer's disease.

Let's look into what dementia does to the brain and how radiologists use MRI to identify Dementia:

1) Shrinking (brain atrophy) - this is especially in the hippocampus, temporal lobes and cortex

2) Cortical thinning - the brain's outer layer is the cortex. Automated volumetric analysis can compare a patient's brain size to a normal brain.

3) White matter lesions: associated with vascular dementia, in T2 MRI sequences, these bright spots may indicate small vessel disease and are common in vascular dementia.

Below is an example of brain atrophy: