Elena Herranz1,2, Costanza Giannì1,2, Céline Louapre1,2, Constantina Andrada Treaba1,2, Sindhuja T Govindarajan1, Gabriel Mangeat1,3, Russell Ouellette1, Marco L Loggia1,2, Noreen Ward1, Eric C Klawiter1,2,4, Ciprian Catana1,2, Jacob A Sloane2,5, Jacob M Hooker1,2, Revere P. Kinkel6, and Caterina Mainero1,2
1Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States, 3Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, 4Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, United States, 5Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, United States, 6University of California, San Diego, CA, United States
In multiple sclerosis (MS) histopathological investigations
implicated neuroinflammation through microglia and/or macrophages activation in
the pathogenesis of cortical and subcortical diffuse damage. By combining 11C-PBR28 positron
emission tomography (PET) imaging with
anatomical 7T and 3T MRI, we investigated the presence and correlates of neuroinflammation
in cortex and gray matter of subjects with MS. We found that neuroinflammation was
present in thalamus, hippocampus, basal ganglia as well as cortex, particularly
cortical lesions, and associated with structural damage, increased neurological
disability and impaired information processing speed. Our data indicate that
neuroinflammation is closely associated with neurodegeneration.
