NCT00527176

Pulse Corticosteroid Therapy and Effect on Brain Water Diffusivity

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: —
• Sponsor: Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc- Université Catholique de Louvain · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

In daily clinical use, pulse high dosis corticosteroids are used to treat cerebral edema in different pathological situations ( surgery, trauma, tumors...). Dehydration can theorically concern extra-cellular or intracellular water, or both. The relative proportion of those two components are not known, as well their kinetics. Diffusion Weighted Imaging ( DWI) is a none invasive and none toxic technique to study those phenomena.We can also study the diffusivity anisotropy not using a Gaussian distribution but rather a non- gaussian one, more close to the reality ( q Space Imaging ). Finally, we can study the compartment redistribution between slow and rapid water molecules diffusion by bi-exponential decomposition of the diffusion signal, corresponding, theorically, respectively to the intra- and extra-cellular component. Hypothesis : The high dosis steroid pulse therapy modifies or not the water free diffusion in DWI and qSI ? Is there a modification in the diffusivity of both rapid and slow component ?

Conditions

• Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Timeline

• Start date: 2007-09-01
• Completion: 2007-09-01
• First posted: 2007-09-10
• Last updated: 2007-09-10

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Belgium