Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 24|pp 25805—25818

MRI-visible perivascular spaces are associated with cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers in Parkinson’s disease

Yi Fang¹, Lu-Yan Gu¹, Jun Tian¹, Shao-Bing Dai², Ying Chen¹, Ran Zheng¹, Xiao-Li Si^1,³, Chong-Yao Jin¹, Zhe Song¹, Ya-Ping Yan¹, Xin-Zhen Yin¹, Jia-Li Pu¹, Bao-Rong Zhang¹

¹Department of Neurology, Second Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310009, Zhejiang, China
²Department of Anesthesiology, Women's Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310009, Zhejiang, China
³Department of Neurology, Affiliated Hangzhou First People’s Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou 310006, Zhejiang, China

* Equal contribution

Received: July 20, 2020Accepted: September 29, 2020Published: November 25, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104200

Copyright: © 2020 Fang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Perivascular spaces in the brain have been known to communicate with cerebrospinal fluid and contribute to waste clearance in animal models. In this study, we sought to determine the association between MRI-visible enlarged perivascular spaces (EPVS) and disease markers in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We obtained longitudinal data from 245 patients with PD and 98 healthy controls from the Parkinson’s Progression Marker Initiative. Two trained neurologists performed visual ratings on T2-weighted images to characterize EPVS in the centrum semiovale (CSO), the basal ganglia (BG) and the midbrain. We found that a greater proportion of patients with PD had low grade BG-EPVS relative to healthy controls. In patients with PD, lower grade of BG-EPVS and CSO-EPVS predicted lower CSF α-synuclein and t-tau. Lower grade of BG-EPVS were also associated with accelerated Hoehn &Yahr stage progression in patients with baseline stage 1. BG-EPVS might be a valuable predictor of disease progression.