Abstract #2547

Evidence for increasing hippocampal metabolite concentrations during healthy aging

Leo Sporn^1,2, Erin L MacMillan^3,4,5, Ruiyang Ge⁶, Kyle Greenway⁷, Cornelia Laule^1,2,8, and Fidel Vila-Rodriguez⁶

¹Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ²International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ³Philips Healthcare, Markham, ON, Canada, ⁴Radiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁵Mechatronic Systems Engineering, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁶Psychiatry, Non-Invasive Neurostimulation Therapies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, ⁷Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, ⁸Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Previous magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) studies have concluded that hippocampal metabolite concentrations remain stable during healthy adult aging. However, these studies used short repetition times (TR ≤ 2s), which leads to heavy T₁-weighting. We used a longer TR (4s) to reduce T₁-weighting and found hippocampal metabolite concentrations increase with age for N-acetyl-aspartate, creatine, choline and myo-inositol. Our findings illustrate the importance of using sufficiently long TR in MRS to avoid T₁-relaxation effects influencing the measurement of metabolite concentrations.

This abstract and the presentation materials are available to members only; a login is required.

Join Here