Bejoy Thomas
We chose to research this topic because our institute is a national facility for treatment, training, and research for neurologic and cardiovascular diseases in India. We have a strong subspecialty program on dementia and allied disorders and an ongoing registry for the same.
ERICA is a recently described, simple imaging scoring system for grading entorhinal cortical volume loss and has been shown to be useful in the classification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer disease (AD), with some limitations as explained in our paper. Molecular imaging has been widely used in the differentiation and characterization of dementing illnesses. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in using arterial spin-labeling (ASL) in comparison with PET for the same. One of the earliest metabolic and/or perfusion changes occurring in MCI and AD is in the posterior cingulate and precuneus regions. Hence, we thought combining the perfusion measurement of this region and grade of atrophy of the entorhinal cortex by the ERICA score may be much better to differentiate them from each other and also from healthy controls. This may be of particular importance for resource-poor nations where molecular imaging may not be widely available for dementia evaluation.