Effects of therapy on the 1H NMR spectrum of a human glioma line.

Currently it is difficult to predict the efficacy of any therapeutic modality in individual patients. If it could be shown that successful therapy causes some chemical alteration in the tumor before gross alteration in size becomes radiologically visible, the therapeutic regimen could potentially be modified, sparing the patients longer trials of ineffective therapy. We used proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to detect the presence of simple metabolites (such as lactic acid, creatine/phosphocreatine, N-acetyl aspartate, and the "choline" pool) in extracts of a human glioma grown subcutaneously in athymic ("nu/nu") mice.