Characteristics of hippocampal volumes in healthy Chinese from MRI

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The volume of hippocampus has been associated with a number of disorders and would be helpful in clinical and research practice. This study provided the normal data of hippocampal volumes in a healthy Chinese sample and assessed the possible effects of age, gender and side on it. METHODS: Sixty-one normal participants with a broad age span from 6 to 82 years were enrolled in the study. The hippocampal volumes of them were obtained from oblique coronal MR images using inversion recovery (IR) sequence and normalized to adjust intersubject variation in head size. RESULTS: The corrected volume in the right side of hippocampus was 2.204-2.944 cm(3), and 2.068-2.700 cm(3) in the left. There were no statistically significant differences among different age and gender groups (p>0.05). The volume of right hippocampus was larger than that of the left side (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: We presented the volume range of hippocampus in healthy Chinese on MRI in this study. No age and gender effects were found on hippocampal volumes. Side-to-side asymmetry was obtained by statistical analysis.