Oct. 22, 2003 -- Iron deposits deep in the brain may cause multiple sclerosis, new imaging studies suggest.

The findings come from studies of computer-assisted brain scans using a specialized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device. University at Buffalo, N.Y., researchers Rohit Bakshi, MD, and colleagues are the first to use this technique to study multiple sclerosis. Bakshi reported the findings at this week's annual meeting of the American Neurological Association in San Francisco.

Multiple sclerosis has been considered a disease of the white matter in the brain and spinal cord -- the neural pathways that allow areas of gray matter to communicate with one another. But the new findings link iron deposits in the gray matter to movement and thinking impairments in multiple sclerosis.

"If we're going to treat this disease, we have to know where the damage is," Bakshi says in a news release. "Traditionally, we thought MS was strictly a white-matter disease. ... We were able to visualize gray matter structures deep in the brain of MS patients and found some to be atrophied."

These areas of brain damage contained abnormally high levels of iron. It's not yet clear that the iron is the cause of the brain damage. It could be that dying brain cells leave a trail of iron behind.