Well, no sooner had I claimed there was no CLIPPERS news, then a mini-flurry of new reports has appeared. So the first (and probably least interesting from the patient perspective) is as follows:
Pesaresi I, Sabato M, Desideri I, Puglioli M, Moretti P, Cosottini M., Unit of Neuroradiology, AOUP, Santa Chiara Hospital, Pisa, Italy.
This is a paper which investigates the appearance of CLIPPERS lesions on different kinds of MR image. Those of you who have had an MRI scan will probably remember the radiographer saying things like "First scan now for 2 minutes" or "Stay still, this one takes about 6 minutes". Each time, the scanner is being adjusted to collect different kinds of image which highlight different properties of brain tissue. Now, the images people most often report in CLIPPERS papers are the contrast-enhanced ones where an image is collected before and after the injection of a drug which changes the appearance of any lesions (because of damage to the Blood-Brain-Barrier). You can see images of my CLIPPER brain in this blog entry from 2011.
I'm getting to the point now. It would be better if CLIPPERS lesions could be reliably identified using images which don't require injections. Also other kinds of MR images might show up new information about CLIPPERS in the brain. So these researchers in Italy looked at two different kinds of MR image on a 3T scanner (the number of T is the magnetic field strength and is usually 1.5T or 3T in hospitals). Although this sounds like a methods paper, it is really another case study as they only look at results from one patient - we're still a rare breed. However they do discuss what could be going on in the tissue to make the lesions visible in the two kinds of image which I'm sure will be of interest to the medics. More updates soon.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
