"Thief" of Life and Dignity
At the age of 87, Mr. Ba Jin wrote in a letter, "I am sick. writing is difficult for me now. The hand holding the pen won’t follow the instruction... Sometimes I feel that the pen weighs ten thousand pounds..." At that time, he had been diagnosed with PD for 8 years.
In addition to the author Ba Jin, other well-known celebrities including the boxing champion Muhammad Ali, the mathematician Chen Jingrun and the artist Salvador Dali were also PD patients. Currently, more than 7 million people worldwide are suffering from it. Experts from the World Health Organization predict that China will have 5 million PD patients in 2030, equivalent to a quarter of Beijing's permanent population.
Incidence of PD
PD is a common neurodegenerative disease, of which the main clinical features include four motor dysfunctions, namely rest tremor, rigid muscles, bradykinesia and abnormal posture and gait. It often occurs in middle-aged and elderly people.
PD was like a "thief" who slowly steals all energy and dignity of patients. However, due to limitations of current medical technology, the rate of misdiagnosis is high. PD also can not be cured. The only method is to use drugs or surgery to control disease deterioration - but the treatment effects become weaker as patients enter the advanced stage.
Therefore, what we strive to do is to make interventions for Parkinson's patients as early as possible, leaving enough time for their brain to "slowing down."
Nowhere to Hide
Nowhere to Hide
With the help of medical imageology, we can find brain lesions before clinical features appear and provide a more direct basis for judgment to achieve more accurate early screening of PD.
However, due to the varying imaging characteristics of different medical imaging equipment, the final results have their own limitations. For example, the commonly used CT and MR scans have advantages only in single brain structure imaging or brain function imaging. It is difficult for us to get comprehensive information.
The emergence of integrated PET/MR has broken through previous limitations. It allows us to observe changes in the patient's brain structure, brain function and metabolic pattern at one time. This breakthrough helping doctors get a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis, provide more objective and quantitative diagnostic basis. In January 2019, United Imaging Healthcare's integrated PET/MR system was installed in Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, which took a leading position in the field of neurological diagnosis and treatment in China. A series of case studies have proved that integrated PET/MR can help doctors make accurate judgments and avoid misdiagnosis.
More Objective and Quantitative Diagnostic Basis
The synaptic functions of dopamine neurons in the caudate nucleus that looks like "rabbit ear" in a PD patient on the left are clearly impaired (the main pathogenesis).
Avoid Misdiagnosis
In the past, in clinical diagnosis with little help from medical imaging, it was easy to misdiagnose PDas MSA because they had very similar clinical symptoms. The PET/MR scans of heads show opposite glucose metabolic performances in bilateral putamen of the two patients. The images show the difference directly and eliminate the possibility of misdiagnosis.