One of the more interesting aspects of research is when scientists have discussions in public via the letters pages of scientific journals. One such letter has appeared in response to a short paper which I discussed briefly last year. Essentially, in the original paper, the authors examined a CLIPPERS patient using some different types of MR image acquired on a modern scanner with a stronger magnetic field than in some previous studies ("3T").

In this letter ("CLIPPERS and its related disorders, relevance of brain 3.0 T MR"), Dr Taieb and his colleagues suggest that although some of the observed differences seen could be due to the stronger magnetic field and different types of images, they may still not be sufficient to distinguish CLIPPERS from two competing conditions (primary angitis of the CNS and B-cell CNS Lymphoma). They very sensibly suggest that more work needs to be done to confirm the original observations in more patients. Also they stress the need to compare the appearance of the MR images directly with that of tissue samples, so that a detailed understanding of how the tissue is affecting the MRI can be obtained.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.