Correlation of cerebral metabolites with clinical outcome among patients with severe congestive heart failure.

Patients with severe congestive heart failure have deranged cognition,1,2 and their ability to manage everyday problems is impaired.3 Cardiovascular reflexes, as well as autonomic and endocrine functions that may involve the central nervous system, are also profoundly disrupted. It is therefore of the utmost importance to understand the consequences of severe congestive heart failure for brain function and metabolism. In vivo proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H MRS) is generating interest for 2 reasons. First, H MRS provides a new probe of cerebral function that measures important brain metabolites by detecting the hydrogen nuclei in these molecules. Furthermore, this examination is becoming widely available, and the patient’s experience is virtually identical to that with conventional MRI.