Neuroimaging has provided unprecedented opportunities for relating anatomical measures to behavioral abnormalities in schizophrenia. These relationships may provide a means for understanding neural dysfunction when such dysfunction is manifested in an anatomical abnormality. In particular the development of MRI methods which give excellent tissue contrast in the brain may provide new insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. The emergence of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy as a method which provides metabolic measures from well defined regions of the brain. The overall goal of this proposal is to relate the regional metabolic measures in patients diagnosed with first episode schizophrenia to neuroanatomic, clinical and neurobehavioral functioning. The integration of all of these measures is important in reaching an understanding of regional brain function is schizophrenia. We plan to obtain quantitative estimates of the regional concentrations of compounds present in the brains of first episode schizophrenics using solvent suppressed MRS. Our hypothesis is that the levels of one of these compounds, N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) can be used to assess cellular function while the levels of so called excitatory amino acids such as glutamate and GABA can also be determined quantitatively. We also plan to carry out a longitudinal study of these patients during treatment. Our hypothesis is that the alterations in the levels of the compounds observed will provide predictors of response or failure.
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| Serrai, Hacene; Clayton, David B; Senhadji, Lotfi et al. (2002) Localized proton spectroscopy without water suppression: removal of gradient induced frequency modulations by modulus signal selection. J Magn Reson 154:53-9 |
| Serrai, H; Senhadji, L; Clayton, D B et al. (2001) Water modeled signal removal and data quantification in localized MR spectroscopy using a time-scale postacquistion method. J Magn Reson 149:45-51 |
| Clayton, D B; Elliott, M A; Leigh, J S et al. (2001) 1H spectroscopy without solvent suppression: characterization of signal modulations at short echo times. J Magn Reson 153:203-9 |
