BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Our aim was to investigate the presence of brain gray matter (GM) abnormalities in patients with different forms of essential tremor (ET).

Objective: The aim of our study was to investigate the microstructural integrity of brain regions functionally involved in the tremor loop in patients with familial essential tremor (FET), using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Essential tremor (ET) is a slowly progressive disorder characterized by postural and kinetic tremors most commonly affecting the forearms and hands. Several lines of evidence from physiologic and neuroimaging studies point toward a major role of the cerebellum in this disease. Recently, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) has been proposed to quantify cerebellar atrophy in ET. However, VBM was not originally designed to study subcortical structures, and the complicated anatomy of the cerebellum may hamper the automatic processing of VBM. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy and utility of using automated subcortical segmentation to identify atrophy of the cerebellum and other subcortical structures in patients with ET.