Iron
Iron accumulation in the substantia nigra, MRI iron mapping and iron-chelator trials (deferiprone).
State of the art
No update yet for Iron. An update is a standalone state-of-the-art for the topic — what someone with Parkinson's needs to know about where this approach stands today.
-
Superior dorsal nigral hyperintensity depiction at 7 T MRI using CLEAR-DESS improves diagnosis performance of Parkinson’s disease
SWI — an iron-sensitive MRI sequence widely used for nigral iron mapping in PD — was directly compared against the iron-suppressing CLEAR-DESS sequence in 7T MRI. CLEAR-DESS, which attenuates both fluid and blood-vessel signal rather than exploiting iron contrast, significantly outperformed SWI on every diagnostic metric, suggesting that free-water and vessel suppression adds more diagnostic value than iron weighting alone for visualising the dorsal substantia nigra.