Sridhar Vajapeyam1, Henry Feldman2, Kirsten Ecklund1, Catherine Buzney3, Paul K. Kleinman1, Robert Vincent Mulkern1, Catherine Gordon3
1Radiology, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, MA, USA; 2Clinical Research Program, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, MA, USA; 3Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, Boston, MA, USA
T1-weighted imaging of the knees of adolescent girls with anorexia nervosa (AN) has been found to show consistently higher signal intensity and greater homogeneity in the femur and tibia as compared to normal adolescents, who typically exhibit striations and regions of lower signal, representing red hematopoietic marrow. We performed T1 relaxometry measurements on a cohort of adolescent girls with AN as well as age-matched controls to study this phenomenon. Mean T1 values in distal femoral and proximal tibial metaphyses of anorexics was significantly higher compared to age-matched controls (p=0.04).