The goals of this research are to develop advanced magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and imaging techniques and to apply them and other complementary methods to studying brain metabolism, neurotransmission and enzyme activity. MRS allows measurement of neurotransmission of glutamate and GABA in vivo, which play important roles in many major psychiatric diseases including depression and schizophrenia. During 2009-2010, significant progress was made in the development and applications of novel spectroscopic techniques for studying metabolism and neurotransmission in vivo in the brain. From our previous work with Dr. Gregor Hasler et al, we found that GABA concentration is decreased in patients with major depressive disorder but normal in remitted patients (Hasler et al, Biological Psychiatry, 58:969-973, 2005 and Archives of General Psychiatry, 64:193-200, 2007). Major depression has been considered to involve glutamate hyperactivity. Therefore, the GABA study sugests a link between GABA level and glutamate hyperactivity. We hypothesized that GABA level is negatively correlated with glutamate-glutamine cycling flux, the latter is an indicator of glutamate efflux and measurable using MRS. To test this hypothesis, we conducted animal studies using proton MRS to measure GABA level and carbon-13 MRS to measure the glutamate-glutamine cycling flux. We used vigabatrin to elevate brain endogenous GABA. Vigabatrin is an anticonvulsant drug which specifically blocks GABA degradation. We found that the carbon-13 label flow from astroglial glutamine to neuronal glutamate is significantly reduced with increased GABA (Yang et al, J. Neural Transm., 116:291-300 (2009)). This result suggests a glutamatergic mechanism of GABA elevating drug, probably via GABAA-mediated inhibition of cortical glutamatergic neurons through interneurons. This result also sheds light on the mood-stablizing effect of GABAergic drugs. In addition, in collaboration with Dr. Hasler, we have also examined effect of psychological stress on GABA and found that prefrontal GABA was significantly reduced in a shock protocol (Hasler et al, Am J. Psychiatry, in press.). We also proposed a novel method for extracting MRS signals from irregularly shaped region of interest using the sensitivity heterogeneity of multichannel phased array receive coils (An et al, submitted to Magn Reson Med).

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Project End
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Budget End
Support Year
8
Fiscal Year
2010
Total Cost
$1,734,427
Indirect Cost
Name
U.S. National Institute of Mental Health
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Evans, Jennifer W; Lally, Níall; An, Li et al. (2018) 7T 1H-MRS in major depressive disorder: a Ketamine Treatment Study. Neuropsychopharmacology 43:1908-1914
Li, Shizhe; An, Li; Duan, Qi et al. (2018) Determining the Rate of Carbonic Anhydrase Reaction in the Human Brain. Sci Rep 8:2328
An, Li; Araneta, Maria Ferraris; Johnson, Christopher et al. (2018) Simultaneous measurement of glutamate, glutamine, GABA, and glutathione by spectral editing without subtraction. Magn Reson Med 80:1776-1786
Marenco, Stefano; Meyer, Christian; van der Veen, Jan Willem et al. (2018) Role of gamma-amino-butyric acid in the dorsal anterior cingulate in age-associated changes in cognition. Neuropsychopharmacology 43:2285-2291
Li, Ningzhi; Li, Shizhe; Shen, Jun (2017) Reconstruction of randomly under-sampled spectra for in vivo13C magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Magn Reson Imaging 37:216-221
Li, Ningzhi; Li, Shizhe; Shen, Jun (2017) High Field In vivo13C Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Brain by Random Radiofrequency Heteronuclear Decoupling and Data Undersampling. Front Phys 5:
van der Veen, Jan Willem; Marenco, Stefano; Berman, Karen F et al. (2017) Retrospective correction of frequency drift in spectral editing: The GABA editing example. NMR Biomed 30:
An, Li; Li, Shizhe; Shen, Jun (2017) Simultaneous determination of metabolite concentrations, T1 and T2 relaxation times. Magn Reson Med 78:2072-2081
Zhang, Yan; An, Li; Shen, Jun (2017) Fast computation of full density matrix of multispin systems for spatially localized in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Med Phys 44:4169-4178
Zhang, Yan; Shen, Jun (2016) Simultaneous quantification of glutamate and glutamine by J-modulated spectroscopy at 3 Tesla. Magn Reson Med 76:725-32

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