Purpose: To measure the in vivo longitudinal relaxation time T1 of GABA at 3 Tesla (T).
Materials and methods: J-difference edited single-voxel MR spectroscopy was used to isolate γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signals. An increased echo time (80 ms) acquisition was used, accommodating the longer, more selective editing pulses required for symmetric editing-based suppression of co-edited macromolecular signal. Acquiring edited GABA measurements at a range of relaxation times in 10 healthy participants, a saturation-recovery equation was used to model the integrated data.
Results: The longitudinal relaxation time of GABA was measured as T(1,GABA) = 1.31 ± 0.16 s.
Conclusion: The method described has been successfully applied to measure the T1 of GABA in vivo at 3T.
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