Abstract #0320

Nielsen K, Tsakiri A, Skimminge A, Madsen K, Frederiksen J, Lund T

To further elucidate the mechanisms of recovery of vision in acute optic neuritis (ON), we conducted a longitudinal fMRI-study at 3T of activation of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) during visual stimulation of patients with ON. Sixteen patients were examined acutely, and two weeks, three and six months later.At each time-point we calculated the average BOLD signal change in LGN during stimulation of affected and unaffected eyes. We found a clear tendency towards smaller differences in LGN activation between affected and unaffected eyes over time, indicating that the amount of signals reaching LGN from affected eyes increases during recovery.