Abstract #2932

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) in degenerative cervical spinal cord compression.

Petr Bednarik¹, Tomas Horak², Magda Horakova³, Alena Svatkova⁴, Zdenek Kadanka³, Zdenek Kadanka jr³, Petr Kudlicka⁵, Jan Valosek⁶, Dinesh Deelchand⁷, Pierre-Gilles Henry⁷, and Josef Bednarik³

¹Departement of Medical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, High Field MR Center, Vienna, Austria, ²Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, ³Department of Neurology, University Hospital Brno, Brno, Czech Republic, ⁴Department of Internal Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, ⁵Multimodal and Functional Imaging Laboratory, Central European Institute of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic, ⁶Departments of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering, University Hospital Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic, ⁷Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States

While cervical spinal cord (CSC) compression occurs almost ubiquitously with aging, early metabolic changes in CSC that might develop into irreversible clinical myelopathy symptoms have not been described yet. Thus, we utilized fine-tuned semi-LASER 3T MRS protocol that addresses limitations of standard MRS methods to unravel metabolic damage in the cranial parts of the CSC in 50 patients with non-myelopathic degenerative cervical cord compression and 10 with clinically symptomatic degenerative cervical myelopathy in comparison to 35 healthy controls. Higher tNAA/tCr and myo-Ins/tNAA levels suggest axonal loss above the level of stenosis, indicating that CSC impairment exceeds the level of compression.

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