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 (protocol no. 11-M-0045, NCT no. 01266577;protocol no. 05-M-0144, NCT no. 00109174). 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 2013-2014, we have made significant progress in the development and applications of novel spectroscopic and imaging techniques for studying metabolism and neurotransmission in vivo in the brain. We have succeeded in routinely obtaining high quality MRS data using a 7 Tesla whole body scanner. We have developed 7 Tesla single-shot methods for measuring N-acetylaspartylglutamate (NAAG), glutamate, glutamine and glutathione (An et al, Magn Reson Med, in press;An et al, Magn Reson Med, in press). Building on our previous collaborations with Dr. Zarate's group we are now measuring the effect of ketamine on glutamate at 7 Tesla. Collaborations with Dr. Hasler's group have led to clinical findings of an association between prefrontal NAA and the BDNF gene (Salehi et al, Intl J. Neuropsychopharmacology, 2013). Finally, we found an objective method to regularize the parametrization of spectral baseline in short echo time MRS.
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