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Disturbing MRI - Medical World Stumped!

I recently had a spinal MRI which showed MANY black circles, distributed throughout the spinal cord and into the brain (extent unknown).

To date (six months on) no doctor has been able to offer an explanation for what these anomalies may be. I have seen the Director of Neurosurgery at a large and well-known clinic, a rheumatologist, two neurologists and several other doctors, including my own. They all shrug their shoulders but offer no suggestions.

My spinal history, granted, is horrendous: 5 surgeries and currently 2 cervical, 2 thoracic and 2 lumbar protrusions, advanced disk degenration, scoliosis blah, blah. You get the idea.

These new "black rings" are disturbing, though.

In places, they arrear to be moving through the cord, breaking outwards and also intruding INTO the center of the cord by breaking through the cord layers (pia and arachnoid)

It is quite amazing to watch the MRI in movie mode to see these rings "moving" through the spinal cord and 'puff' into the dural sac, or tear the gray matter and enter it.

If this is MS, I should long ago have been pushing up daisies . . .

I have a beautiful almost 2-year old daughter. If possible, I would like to spend some more time with her so she remembers me. After that, what will be, will be. But I'd stil like to know what these weird rings are.

As I live in Austin, Texas, medical attention is hard to come by, but they HAVE deemed me as handicapped, lucky me. $10,000+ in medical bills later, I am none-the-wiser.

If anybody has ANY idea what these black rings may be, I would love to know. I have come up with several explanations, but can then always find something that doesn't fit the theory. So far I've heard MND, MS, X-cancer, hemorrhages, calcifications, cysts, etc, but these do not seem likely and on further investigation, can probably be eliminated.

I live with intractable pain 24/7, but am not sure if these black rings are adding to the problem. My guess would be yes!

As standard neurological tests do not show anything significant, my condition clearly does not exist (sound familiar?)

I have added a link to a PDF file of the images to show these peculiar artifacts and am open to any suggestions as to their origin.

As I said, the cord has HUNDREDS of these dots of varying size, but I selected a few to illustrate the point. If Dr. Joshua is interested in this bizarre case, I can chat offline/telephone and supply MRIs on CD.

The PDF file can be found here:-

http://www.grahammurray.com/black_dots.pdf


Many thanks in advance

Graham Murray

ps - I attended Med School so doctors (if interested) can use regular medical language.

Answers:


They look like gas bubbles, which are usually caused by a CSF (cerebrospinal fluid leak). In this case, as the pictures are from a CT-myelogram, the most common cause is CSF leakage through the needle through which the contrast medium was injected. And when CSF leaks out, air leaks in, and these bubbles will turn up on the images. If that is the case, they are harmless and will disappear on their own.

In these pictures, none of the black dots are in the spinal cord. They look like they are in the intradural, extra-axial space, which is in agreement with the CSF leakage theory.