MRI evaluation of vascular dementia

Yicheng Liu; Hongxing Zhang; Wei Huang; Wenjun Wan; Hongfen Peng

摘要：OBJECTTVE: To explain the association between vascular dementia and the cranial MRI manifestations, and recognize the value of cranial MRI in the early diagnosis of vascular dementia and the assessment of disease conditions.DATA SOURCES: Pubmed database was searched to identify articles about the cranial MRI manifestations of patients with vascular dementia published in English from January 1992 to June 2006 by using the key words of "MRI, vascular dementia". Others were collected by searching the name of journals and title of articles in the Chinese full-text journal database.STUDY SELECTTON: The collected articles were primarily checked, those correlated with the cranial MRI manifestations of patients with vascular dementia were selected, while the obviously irrelative ones were excluded, and the rest were retrieved manually, the full-texts were searched.DATA EXTRACTION: Totally 255 articles were collected, 41 of them were involved, and the other 214 were excluded.DATA SYNTHESIS: MRI can be taken as one of the effective methods for the early diagnosis and disease evaluation of vascular dementia. White matter lesions are the important risk factors of vascular dementia.Vascular dementia is accompanied by the atrophy of related brain sites, but further confirmation is needed to investigate whether there is significant difference. MRI can be used to quantitatively investigate the infarcted sites and sizes of patients with vascular dementia after infarction, but there is still lack of systematic investigation on the association of the infarcted sites and sizes with the cognitive function of patients with vascular dementia.CONCLUSTON: Cranial MRI can detect the symptoms of vascular dementia at early period, so that corresponding measures can be adopted to prevent and treat vascular dementia in time.