Pattern of MRI brain in neuro-psychiatric SLE. Effect of anti-phospholipid antibodies: A study at a tertiary care teaching hospital

Objective: to compare the neuro-radiologic findings in systemic lupus erythematosus (sle) patients with and without antiphospholipid antibodies (apl) in different neuro-psychiatric manifestations. methods: this cross-sectional comparative study was carried out at king khalid university hospital, a tertiary care teaching hospital, riyadh, saudi arabia from june 2012 to january 2015. ninety seven sle patients with neuro-psychiatric manifestations were included in the study and divided into two groups. group i (50 patients) sle with apl and group ii (47 patients) sle without apl. we compared demographic features, clinical manifestations and magnetic resonance imaging (mri) brain findings. results: demographic and clinical characteristics of two groups were similar. in group-i, anticardiolipin antibodies (acl) were most common (86%). in patients with headache, most of the patients in group-i had white matter hyperintensities (wmhis) (50% vs 27%) while most of the patients in group-ii had normal mri brain (38% vs 73%). similarly wmhis were found more in group-i patients with seizures (60% vs 21%), while ischemia/infarction, atrophy and normal mri were found in group-ii. mri brain in patients with neurological deficit and psychiatric disorder were not much different in both the groups. conclusion: we found no statistically significant differences in frequencies of mri brain abnormalities in sle patients with and without apl antibodies. each of the three apl may have a variable effect on the brain.