Figure 1: Illustration of the T2* calculation procedure. (A) A set of FIDs with different time-shifts (Δt) was generated (shift between 0ms and 30ms in 5ms interval) by progressively discarding the first points (represented in grey) of the originally acquired FID. (B) FIDs were Fourier transformed (spectra shown in black) and fitted with LCModel (fits shown in red). A basis-set was generated using a Matlab® routine for each Δt. (C) A linear regression was used to fit the logarithm of the signal of five brain metabolites as a function of Δt. T2* values were estimated as -1/slope of the fit.

Figure 3: (A) Logarithm of the signal of metabolites was quantified at all time-shifts (Δt) and fitted with a linear regression. The data (circle) and fit (black line) for the mean over all participants is shown. The error bars represent the standard deviation over subjects and the dashed grey line indicates the 95% confidence interval. (B) T2* values of five brain metabolites are shown, suggesting lower values in astrocytes cells. Paired Student’s t-test was used to estimate differences (*p< 0.05, ***p< 0.001). The error bars represent the standard deviation over subjects.