Recipient organisationNIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre
NIHR supportRecorded as supported by this research centre
PeriodFeb 2025 — Feb 2026
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Doctors currently have no reliable way to tell whether subtle chemical changes in a living brain are signs of early neurodegeneration or just normal ageing. This project will scan healthy volunteers to build a reference dataset of two types of brain chemistry—proton and phosphorus metabolism—across the adult lifespan. The problem is that existing brain-scanning techniques can measure these chemicals, but without a healthy-ageing baseline, researchers cannot confidently distinguish disease from normal variation. The team will establish a standardised method to acquire both types of data simultaneously, then collect scans from a group of healthy people of different ages and sexes. If successful, this normative dataset will become the control reference for all future UK studies using these spectroscopy techniques. Clinical trials for dementia or other neurodegenerative conditions will be able to detect drug effects more reliably, because they can subtract out age- and sex-related chemical shifts. The work is primarily a fundamental-science infrastructure project—it does not test a treatment or diagnose a disease directly—but it provides the essential yardstick that makes those later applications possible.
View original technical description
Multimodal neuroimaging techniques, including multinuclear spctroscopy can offer great promise in neurodegeneration, either to develop a deeper understanding of pathogenic processes and facilitate mechanistic stratification or to use as outocme measures in clinical trials. 1H (proton) spectroscopy (1H-MRS) and 31Phosphorus (31P-MRS) spectroscopy can offer key insignts into neuronal integrity, and metabolism. Locally the ImEng theme have already established a 3D CSI acquisition for 31P-MRS. However, the utility of 31P-MRS could be greatly improved by complementing it with 1H-MRS, to more comprehensively assess for neurometabolic changes in neurodegeneration. To facilitate this we wish to generate a normative dataset of 2D CSI-PRESS spectroscopic data of the healthy aging brain for 1H-MRS and 31P-MRS. This normative dataset can then be used for all future studies using these techniques as a reference dataset. It will also enable the establishment of 2D CSI-PRESS 1H-MRS . Normative datasets are key to enable studies to effectively control for age and sex related changes in 1H-MRS and 31P-MRS whilst also improving their ability to detect differences between neurodegnerative conditions and health. It will also ensure a robust reference dataset to validate our protocol development. Our aims are: 1. Establish a 2D CSI-PRESS acquisition of 1H-MRS for use across mutlimodal neuroimaging studies 2. Develop a normative reference dataset of both 31P-MRS and 1H-MRS of the healthy aging brain to utilise in all future neuroimaging studies using these techniques
Imaging and Engineering for Health Translational Neurosciences
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