TORONTO — Cognitive impairment in patients who have childhood-onset systemic lupus erythematosus can be identified with functional magnetic resonance imaging, reported Svetlana Lvovich, D.O., in a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies.
The pilot study, which was done by Dr. Lvovich and her associates, included 10 patients who had systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Five of the patients had cognitive impairment (CI), and five of them did not have CI.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed differences between the patients with CI and those without.
“They [those with CI] need to recruit more neurons to do the task,” she said in an interview. The three tasks that patients were required to perform during fMRI were specially designed to evaluate attention, working memory, and language processing.
Neuropsychiatric testing is the preferred method for diagnosing CI in SLE patients. However, it is time consuming and it requires extensive training to be able to administer it, said Dr. Lvovich of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
In contrast, fMRI is quick and easy to perform.
There also were subtle fMRI differences seen between SLE patients with normal cognition, compared with healthy controls, which suggested that it is SLE-specific processes that contribute to CI rather than the long-term use of steroids,” she noted.
“However, to determine this, we will need to look at patients who are on steroids but don't have SLE,” she said.
“We think that fMRI may be useful to investigate and identify cortical roots of cognitive impairment in children with SLE,” she concluded.