12 patients and 12 age-matched controls underwent SPECT scans with 123I-FP-CIT and a 1.5?T MRI scan with inversion recovery technique. The association between both clinical and neuropsychological features and striatal uptake and volume of substantia nigra was explored.
Striatal (p?<?0.05), caudate (p?<?0.05), and putaminal (p?<?0.01) uptake was significantly lower in patients with respect to controls. Further, the volume of substantia nigra was reduced in HD when compared to controls (p?<?0.01). No relationship between the volume of SN and tracer striatal uptake was found as well as between clinical and neuropsychological features with the SPECT and MRI results.
Our results confirm that the degeneration of nigrostriatal pathway may occur in symptomatic HD patients. If confirmed by larger studies, the lack of any kind of correlation between clinical and neuropsychological features with striatal uptake and volume of substantia nigra suggests that motor and cognitive aspects in HD are not directly related to nigrostriatal degeneration.