TISSUE METABOLISM STUDIED IN VIVO BY NUCLEAR MAGNETIC RESONANCE

¹ Department of Physics in Relation to Surgery, The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PN

N.m.r. is finding increasing application as a non-invasive method of studying metabolism in vivo. ³¹P n.m.r. is particularly useful for studies of energy metabolism, while other nuclei, in particular ¹H, ¹³C and ¹⁹F, can provide additional information about certain aspects of cellular metabolism that are not amenable to investigation by ³¹P n.m.r. The major problem with n.m.r. is lack of sensitivity. The main implications of this are first that signals can only be detected from metabolites that are present at fairly high concentrations, and secondly that the spatial resolution for localized studies, particularly of internal regions of the body, is limited. N.m.r. could considerably enhance our understanding of metabolic abnormalities in disease, but the precise role of such metabolic studies in a clinical setting remains to be evaluated.

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