MRI and Electrophysiological Characterization of Patients Suffering from Pure and Complicated Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia

Hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) is a phenotypically and genotypically heterogeneous neurodegenerative disease encompassing a group of disorders mainly characterized by spastic paraparesis of the lower limbs. From the clinical point of view, HSP can be classified into complicated and pure forms. The present study contains clinical, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electrophysiological investigations of a total of 33 HSP patients suffering from pure (n=22) and complicated forms (n=11), respectively. The MRI standard protocol was performed both for the brain (including a volume-rendering MP-RAGE data set,…