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Updated: May 19, 2026

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Multiple Sclerosis at 7.0 Tesla
Published on: February 19, 2021
MRI correlates of disability in African-Americans with multiple sclerosis
Jonathan Howard1, Marco Battaglini, James Scott Babb
1Department of Neurology, Langone Medical Center, New York, New York, United States of America.
Objectives:
Multiple sclerosis (MS) in African-Americans (AAs) is characterized by more rapid disease progression and poorer response to treatment than in Caucasian-Americans (CAs). MRI provides useful and non-invasive tools to investigate the pathological substrate of clinical progression. The aim of our study was to compare MRI measures of brain damage between AAs and CAs with MS.
Methods:
Retrospective analysis of 97 AAs and 97 CAs with MS matched for age, gender, disease duration and age at MRI examination.
Results:
AA patients had significantly greater T2- (p = 0.001) and T1-weighted (p = 0.0003) lesion volumes compared to CA patients. In contrast, measurements of global and regional brain volume did not significantly differ between the two ethnic groups (p>0.1).
Conclusions:
By studying a quite large sample of well demographically and clinically matched CA and AA patients with a homogeneous MRI protocol we showed that higher lesion accumulation, rather than pronounced brain volume decrease might explain the early progress to ambulatory assistance of AAs with MS.
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