Quantitative cervical proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy of multiple sclerosis.

Since some years brain proton MR spectroscopy (1H-MRS) was considered a useful technique for evaluating neuronal/axonal damage and demyelination in multiple sclerosis (MS). Despite frequently disability in MS is related to spinal cord lesions there are few published works on spectroscopy study of cervical diseases because of the technical difficulties limiting the quality of spectroscopy data. Recently we presented a protocol for quantitative cervical spinal cord single voxel MRS with the first mean relative concentrations ratios for NAA, Cr, Cho and mI in a group of ten healthy volunteers using a clinical 3T system. On this study we applied the same acquisition and post-processing protocol to quantify the main CNS metabolites on the cervical spinal cord plaques of a group of 15 MS patients and compared them with the healthy metabolite content.