Abstract #4030

Abnormal Grey Matter Arteriolar Cerebral Blood Volume and its Association with the Presence of E4 Allele of the Apolipoprotein E (APOE) Gene in Elderly Subjects at Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)

Jun Hua^1,2, SeungWook Lee³, Nicholas I.S. Blair³, Michael Wyss⁴, Simon J Schreiner⁵, Stefanie C Steininger⁵, Sandra Leh⁵, Roger Nitsch⁵, Klaas P Pruessmann⁴, Peter C.M. van Zijl^1,2, Marilyn Albert ⁶, Christoph Hock⁵, and Paul G Unschuld⁵

¹F.M. Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, United States, ²Neurosection, Div. of MRI Research, Dept. of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States, ³Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, ⁴Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, ⁵Division of Psychiatry Research and Psychogeriatric Medicine, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, ⁶Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States

Cerebrovascular dysfunction has been associated with mild-cognitive-impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Recent animal studies in aging show that abnormalities in pial arteries and arterioles start before other blood vessels and blood flow are affected. We show that cerebral-blood-volume of pial arteries and arterioles (CBVa), measured with the inflow-based vascular-space-occupancy (iVASO) MRI, is significantly altered in various brain regions in MCI patients compared to healthy elderly controls. CBVa in the orbitofrontal cortex significantly correlated with APOE-e4 carrier-status, the major genetic risk factor for sporadic AD. Our results suggest CBVa as a potential biomarker at an early stage of the disease.

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