XXII. BIOCHEMICKÝ ZJAZD - Jesseniova lekárska fakulta

Lectures
CHANGES IN NEURONAL METABOLITES MEASURED BY PROTON
MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROSCOPY IN DEPRESSED PATIENTS
DURING TREATMENT
Michal Bittšanský, Veronika Husárová, Igor Ondrejka, Valéria Kerná, Pavol Adamík,
Hubert Poláček and Dušan Dobrota
Jessenius Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University, Martin, Slovakia
Previous works have shown that the symptoms of depressive disorder can be correlated
to the concentrations of proton MR metabolites. In our study, 20 depressive patients
were at the admission to the hospital and after the hospital treatment clinically examined
using MADRS scale (The Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale) and using 1 H
MR-spectroscopy (1.5 Tesla, single-voxel spectroscopy) in both hippocampi. We evaluated
the absolute and relative signals of N-acetyl aspartate (NAA), total creatine (Cre),
total cholines (Cho), myo-inositol (mI) measured with short (30 ms) and long (135 ms)
time echo using calibrated LCModel. We observed statistically significant correlations of
MRS-observable metabolites to the clinical MADRS score, and also significant differences
between the patient groups before and after treatment. Some of the changes seem to
reflect changes in the relaxation times of the metabolites.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the grant 2007/57-UK-17 of Slovak
Ministry of Health and by project “CREATING A NEW DIAGNOSTIC ALGORITHM FOR
SELECTED CANCER DISEASES” co-financed from EU sources and European Regional
Development Fund.
XXII. Biochemistry Congress, Martin
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