Motivation: There is an urgent need to gather location-specific and age-resolved reference data to support MRS quantification of HBCD, the largest MRS study ever. Goal(s): To measure metabolite transverse relaxation times T2 of thalamus in a lifespan cohort. Approach: Metabolite T2s were measured in a cohort of 28 participants aged from 0 to 64 years old. PRESS-localized TE-series spectra in bilateral thalamus were linear combination modeled and T2 estimated from exponential modeling of metabolite coefficients. Results: There was a significant shortening of T2 with age for the four major singlets, tNAA2.0, tCr3.0, tCr3.9 and tCho. Impact: Current practice in MRS quantification is to ignore well-known effects of brain-region and subject age on relaxation times. Location-specific and age-resolved T2 reference values are a pre-requisite for accurate quantification of metabolite concentrations with MRS.
Song et al. (Tue,) studied this question.