IJ Radiology
Farzad Ashrafi1, Hamidreza Haghighatkhah2, Alireza Zali1, Davood Ommi1, Morteza Sanei Taheri2, Hamidreza Moghassemi3, Behruz Alizadeh1, 
Behdad Behnam1,*, Mehran Arabahmadi1Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a critical role in diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) and detecting brain changes during the course of the disease, but many aspects of MR Imaging such as its relationship with MS disabilities has remained unrecognized yet. One of the MS disabilities is cognitive impairment (CI), with an incidence of about 45% to 60%.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between cognitive function and the volume of the brain lesions by assessing some of the sub-items of cognition.
We assessed cognition using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) Test and brain changes in 46 MS patients in whom brain changes were detected with 1.5 tesla MR Imaging. Brain lesions were classified in three regions consisting of juxtacortical, periventricular and infratentorial. Lesion volumes were estimated using MIPAV software. We used SPSS 20 for data analysis. Also, we classified patients according to age, gender, and education.
There were no significant correlation between total lesion volumes and MoCA score. But significant correlations between total lesion volumes with visuospatial/executive function were found in persons with higher education.
White matter lesion volumes have influence on some of the cognition sub-items in MS patients. Furthermore, MRI determinants can be useful for clinicians to evaluate cognition in MS patients.
© 2014, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
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