No Structural Differences Are Revealed by VBM in 'De Novo' Parkinsonian Patients

The identification of brain morphological alterations in newly diagnosed PD patients (i.e. 'de novo') could potentially serve as a biomarker and accelerate diagnosis. However, presently no consensus exists in the literature possibly due to several factors: small size cohorts, differences in segmentation techniques or bad control of false positive rates. In this study, we use the CAT12 pipeline, to seek for morphological brain differences in gray and white matter of 66 controls and 144 de novo PD patients from the PPMI database. Moreover, we search for subcortical structure differences using the VolBrain pipeline. We found no structural brain differences in this de novo Parkinsonian population, neither in tissues using a whole brain analysis nor in any of nine subcortical structures analyzed separately. We conclude that some results published in the literature may appear as false positives and we contest their reproductibility.