Researchers in Germany believe that MR imaging should be included among the World Health Organization’s options for diagnosing sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), which is associated with exposure to mad cow disease.
Researchers in Germany believe that MR imaging should be included among the World Health Organization's options for diagnosing sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), which is associated with exposure to mad cow disease.
Principal investigator Dr. Henriette Tschampa and colleagues at the Clinical University of Bonn enrolled 193 consecutive patients suspected of having the condition. All the patients had previously been examined by a neurologist from the German CJD Surveillance Unit in a study that took place between 1999 and 2002.
In addition to evaluating MRI's utility, the investigators paired study results with those of electroencephalography and 14-3-3 protein analysis. They found that MR provided a reliable diagnosis of sCJD.
In 442 scans, MR's sensitivity and specificity were nearly 70% and 85%, respectively, in patients with a clinical or postmortem sCJD diagnosis. Sensitivity and specificity for EEG and 14-3-3 protein analysis were 32% and 94%, and 91% and 44%, respectively.
MR's imaging protocol included T2-weighted, FLAIR, diffusion-weighted, and proton density-weighted sequences. Three independent observers compared and rated the studies and reached high agreement.
Even though MR's interpretation could require some effort, it provides useful information that could narrow down an sCJD diagnosis, it is 100% noninvasive, and it has an edge over diagnostic alternatives plagued by high false-positive rates. MRI is not among WHO's sanctioned diagnostic tests for sCJD, but the time to incorporate it has come, Tschampa said.
Can Abbreviated Breast MRI Have an Impact in Assessing Post-Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Response?
April 24th 2025New research presented at the Society for Breast Imaging (SBI) conference suggests that abbreviated MRI is comparable to full MRI in assessing pathologic complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer.
New bpMRI Study Suggests AI Offers Comparable Results to Radiologists for PCa Detection
April 15th 2025Demonstrating no significant difference with radiologist detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa), a biparametric MRI-based AI model provided an 88.4 percent sensitivity rate in a recent study.
Could Ultrafast MRI Enhance Detection of Malignant Foci for Breast Cancer?
April 10th 2025In a new study involving over 120 women, nearly two-thirds of whom had a family history of breast cancer, ultrafast MRI findings revealed a 5 percent increase in malignancy risk for each second increase in the difference between lesion and background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) time to enhancement (TTE).