Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, and there is still no effective way to stop its progress. Therefore, early detection is crucial for the prevention and the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The current diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, however, mainly depends on the symptoms, so it is necessary to establish a reliable imaging modality for PD diagnosis and its progression monitoring. Other studies and our previous ones demonstrated that substantia nigra hyperechogenicity (SNH) was detected by transcranial sonography (TCS) in the ventral midbrain of PD patients, and SNH is regarded as a characteristic marker of PD. The present study aimed to explore whether SNH could serve as a reliable imaging modality to monitor the progression of dopaminergic neurodegeneration of PD. The results revealed that the size of SNH was positively related with the degree of dopaminergic neuron death in PD animal models. Furthermore, we revealed that microglia activation contributed to the SNH formation in substantia nigra (SN) in PD models. Taken together, this study suggests that SNH through TCS is a promising imaging modality to monitor the progression of dopaminergic neurodegeneration of PD.

帕金森氏病（PD）是第二大最常见的神经退行性疾病，目前仍没有有效的方法来阻止其发展。因此，早期发现对于预防和治疗帕金森氏病至关重要。但是，目前帕金森氏病的诊断主要取决于症状，因此有必要建立一种可靠的影像学方法来进行PD诊断及其进展监测。其他研究和我们以前的研究表明，经颅超声检查（PDS）在PD患者的腹中脑中发现了黑质超强回声（SNH），SNH被认为是PD的特征性标志。本研究旨在探讨SNH是否可以作为可靠的影像学方法来监测PD多巴胺能神经退行性疾病的进展。结果表明，在PD动物模型中，SNH的大小与多巴胺能神经元的死亡程度呈正相关。此外，我们发现小胶质细胞激活有助于PD模型中黑质（SN）中SNH的形成。综上所述，这项研究表明，通过TCS进行SNH是监测PD多巴胺能神经变性进展的一种有前途的成像方式。