Journal
NEUROIMAGE
Volume 162, Issue -, Pages 249-256Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.08.073
Keywords
alpha-correction; Aging; Atrophy; CSF-correction; GABA; GABA-edited MRS; Gray matter; Tissue-correction; White matter
Funding
- NIH/NIA [K01AG050707, K01AA025306, R01AG054077]
- Center for Cognitive Aging and Memory at the University of Florida
- McKnight Brain Research Foundation
- University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) [UL1TR001427]
- NIH/NCATS Clinical and Translational Science [UL1TR000064, 1KL2TR001429]
- Claude D. Pepper Center at the University of Florida [P30 AG028740]
- NIH [R01 EB016089, P41 EB015909]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Tissue composition impacts the interpretation of magnetic resonance spectroscopy metabolite quantification. The goal of applying tissue correction is to decrease the dependency of metabolite concentrations on the underlying voxel tissue composition. Tissue correction strategies have different underlying assumptions to account for different aspects of the voxel tissue fraction. The most common tissue correction is the CSF-correction that aims to account for the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) fraction in the voxel, in which it is assumed there are no metabolites. More recently, the alpha-correction was introduced to account for the different concentrations of GABA+ in gray matter and white matter. In this paper, we show that the selected tissue correction strategy can alter the interpretation of results using data from a healthy aging cohort with GABA+ measurements in a frontal and posterior voxel. In a frontal voxel, we show an age-related decline in GABA+ when either no tissue correction (R-2 = 0.25, p < 0.001) or the CSF-correction is applied (R-2 = 0.08, p < 0.01). When applying the alpha-correction to the frontal voxel data, we find no relationship between age and GABA+ (R-2 = 0.02, p = 0.15). However, with the alpha-correction we still find that cognitive performance is correlated with GABA+ (R-2 = 0.11, p < 0.01). These data suggest that in healthy aging, while there is normal atrophy in the frontal voxel, GABA+ in the remaining tissue is not decreasing on average. This indicates that the selection of tissue correction can significantly impact the interpretation of MRS results.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available