Taking advantage of the adiabatic inversion based macromolecule (MM) suppression approach, the MM contamination of the neurotransmitter GABA can be significantly reduced in MEGA-PRESS 1H-MR brain spectra. In this work, the longitudinal relaxation times (T1) of brain macromolecules were determined in posterior cortex of healthy subjects in order to adjust the inversion delays for MEGA-PRESS based measurements of pure GABA. Compared to main brain metabolites, T1 times of MMs are significantly shorter and further reveal a very low inter-individual variation, which allows us to use the MM nulling approach without substantial T1 weighing related attenuations of metabolite signals and further to apply fixed TI settings instead of performing individual T1 measurements in future studies.
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