These fuzzy things on MRI are typically in the basal ganglia, and the second most common site is in the cerebellum. We wanted to ask. Maybe when they break up and they go away, there's still some chemistry that' s left behind that's going to tell us what they were. That was what we were interested in. So we designed a study to look at the UBOs using spectroscopy.
Spectroscopy is a way of essentially getting living chemistry.
There are two chemicals, NAA, n-acetyl aspartate , which is a marker for nerve cells. Then there is choline , which is mainly a marker for myelin , and breakdown of myelin in particular, part of the chemicals that go into making the white matter. So it's sort of chemicals for gray matter and white matter, as a sort of a simplification. We wanted to see whether the chemical abnormalities would persist the brain tissue where there had previously been UBOs. These are very visible MRI abnormalities.