Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on January 5, 2005
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi020
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1 Neuroscience Program, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Normal aging and chronic alcoholism result in disruption of brain white matter microstructure that does not typically cause complete lesions but may underlie degradation of functions requiring interhemispheric information transfer. We examined whether the microstructural integrity of the corpus callosum assessed with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) would relate to interhemispheric processing speed. DTI yields estimates of fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of orientation and intravoxel coherence of water diffusion usually in white matter fibers, and diffusivity (<D>), a measure of the amount of intracellular and extracellular fluid diffusion. We tested the hypothesis that FA and <D> would be correlated with (i) the crossed-uncrossed difference (CUD), testing visuomotor interhemispheric transfer; and (ii) the redundant targets effect (RTE), testing parallel processing of visual information presented to each cerebral hemisphere. FA was lower and <D> higher in alcoholics than in controls. In controls but not alcoholics, large CUDs correlated with low FA and high <D> in total corpus callosum and regionally in the genu and splenium. In alcoholics but not controls, small RTEs, elicited with equiluminant stimuli, correlated with low FA in genu and splenium and high <D> in the callosal body. The results provide in vivo evidence for disruption of corpus callosum microstructure in normal aging and alcoholism that has functional ramifications for efficiency in interhemispheric processing.
Article
Corpus Callosal Microstructural Integrity Influences Interhemispheric Processing: A Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study
2 Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 401 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
3 Department of Radiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
4 Neuroscience Program, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, 401 Quarry Road, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
E.V. Sullivan, E-mail: edie{at}stanford.edu
Abstract 
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  M. W. Vernooij, M. A. Ikram, H. A. Vrooman, P. A. Wielopolski, G. P. Krestin, A. Hofman, W. J. Niessen, A. Van der Lugt, and M. M. B. Breteler White Matter Microstructural Integrity and Cognitive Function in a General Elderly Population Arch Gen Psychiatry, May 1, 2009; 66(5): 545 - 553. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 C. Harper The Neuropathology of Alcohol-Related Brain Damage Alcohol Alcohol., March 1, 2009; 44(2): 136 - 140. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 M. Wahl, B. Lauterbach-Soon, E. Hattingen, P. Jung, O. Singer, S. Volz, J. C. Klein, H. Steinmetz, and U. Ziemann Human Motor Corpus Callosum: Topography, Somatotopy, and Link between Microstructure and Function J. Neurosci., November 7, 2007; 27(45): 12132 - 12138. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 A. Pfefferbaum, M. J. Rosenbloom, E. Adalsteinsson, and E. V. Sullivan Diffusion tensor imaging with quantitative fibre tracking in HIV infection and alcoholism comorbidity: synergistic white matter damage Brain, January 1, 2007; 130(1): 48 - 64. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 K. Yamada, H. Matsuzawa, M. Uchiyama, I. L. Kwee, and T. Nakada Brain Developmental Abnormalities in Prader-Willi Syndrome Detected by Diffusion Tensor Imaging Pediatrics, August 1, 2006; 118(2): e442 - e448. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|