Murat Yucel1,2, R. M. Wellard3, Ian Harding1, Mike Kean4, Nadia Solowij5, Dan I. Lubman2, Marc Seal1, Alex Fornito1, Stephen J. Wood1, Christos Pantelis1
1Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 2ORYGEN Youth Heath Research Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 3Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; 4Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Australia; 5University of Wollongong, Australia
In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can be used to study aspects of brain chemistry and metabolism, and has been increasingly applied to the study of pathophysiological mechanisms in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Despite such widespread use, very few studies have quantitatively examined the reliability of these MRS-derived indices. The aim of this study was to examine the test-retest reliability of proton-MRS derived measures of commonly investigated metabolites in a commonly investigated brain region the anterior cingulate cortex. Comparing test-retest variance in these metabolites with inter-subject variance allows us to determine how much of the group differences reported in the literature are due to individual (i.e., biological) versus methodological (i.e., instrumental) factors.