Article Figures & Data
Figures
- Fig 1.
Top (left): Representative axial T1-weighted MPRAGE brain sections of a 45-year-old patient with benign MS and a 47-year-old control (right), both male. Note the atrophy in the patient compared with the control and the T1 hypointense lesion load of the patient. Bottom: The corresponding whole-head 1H-MR spectroscopy (not normalized for VB) on common intensity and frequency scales. Note the NAA peak at 2 ppm and the lipid-suppression performance. Of all the other metabolite peaks seen in the whole-head spectrum, only the NAA is implicitly localized by its biochemistry to just the brain. SS was obtained by integration for use in equation 1.
- Fig 2.
Top: Dot plot of the average annual rate of WBNAA decline of the 43 individual patients with benign MS from equation 3. Closed circles are patients on disease-modifying treatment. Note the narrow distribution (0.16 mmol/L/year full width at half height) and slow (ΔWBNAA − 0.22 mmol/L/year, −1.7%) average annual decline of these patients with benign MS compared with the +2… −3 mmol/L/year range exhibited by patients with RRMS of shorter disease durations.3,39 Bottom: Zoomed detail of the average annual rate of WBNAA decline. Note that not only is the WBNAA decline slow, uniform, and normally distributed but that there is also no distinction between medicated and nonmedicated patients.
- Fig 3.
The WBNAAi concentration of 43 patients with benign MS as a function of their ΔTi (filled circles represent patients on disease-modifying treatment). Also shown are linear predictions previously reported for patients with RRMS of shorter (3–12 years) disease durations (dashed line), the regression for the benign cohort with its 95% confidence intervals (solid and dotted lines), and the ±95% confidence intervals for the WBNAA of the 24 controls (cross-hatch). Note that the regression line for patients with RRMS of short duration falls within the 95% confidence range of the patients with benign MS and their significant loss compared with controls.
