Journal
JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 27, Issue -, Pages 110-113Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jocn.2015.08.044
Keywords
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Excitotoxicity; Glutamate; Magnetic resonance spectroscopy; N-acetyl aspartate; Primary motor cortex
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Funding
- Research Committee of CNS Degenerative Disease from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan
- JSPS KAKENHI [15K19487]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [15K19487] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Glutamate (Glu)-induced excitotoxicity has been implicated in the neuronal loss of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. To test the hypothesis that Glu in the primary motor cortex contributes to disease severity and/or duration, the Glu level was investigated using MR spectroscopy. Seventeen patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were diagnosed according to the El Escorial criteria for suspected, possible, probable or definite amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and enrolled in this cross-sectional study. We measured metabolite concentrations, including N-acetyl aspartate (NAA), creatine, choline, inositol, Glu and glutamine, and performed partial correlation between each metabolite concentration or NAA/Glu ratio and disease severity or duration using age as a covariate. Considering our hypothesis that Glu is associated with neuronal cell death in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, we investigated the ratio of NAA to Glu, and found a significant correlation between NAA/Glu and disease duration (r = -0.574, p = 0.02). The suspected amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients showed the same tendency as possible, probable and definite amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients in regard to correlation of NAA/Glu ratio with disease duration. The other metabolites showed no significant correlation. Our findings suggested that glutamatergic neurons are less vulnerable compared to other neurons and this may be because inhibitory receptors are mainly located presynaptically, which supports the notion of Glu-induced excitotoxicity. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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