Real-Time Neurofeedback Training to Modulate Glutamate-Glutamine Concentration Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy.

Healthy adults receiving accurate feedback learned to shift the measured metabolite signal in the assigned direction. This is a method-development result, not evidence of clinical benefit.

Wang Z, Babu S, Beck N, Frank SM.
NMR in biomedicine · Publication date: 2026-09-21
Added to site: 2026-09-24
DOI: 10.1002/nbm.70399

Electronic publication date verified in the full-text article XML. The indexed MED record lists the November 2026 issue date; first indexed 2026-09-22. This source date is separate from the site's addition date.

Modalities

Neurofeedback, fMRS, MRI

Clinical focus

Glutamate-glutamine, Healthy adults, Method development

Population

Healthy young adults, mean age 23.6 years across the 36 unique participants

Sample

Experiment 1: 30 healthy adults, 15 with veridical feedback and 15 with random feedback; Experiment 2: 15 adults, including nine returning participants and six newly recruited participants

Intervention / method

Thirty real-time fMRS neurofeedback trials using self-selected mental strategies to increase or decrease occipital glutamate-glutamine concentration relative to a reference period

Comparator

Random, non-informative feedback in the first experiment

Clinician summary

Veridical-feedback participants learned to increase Glx in experiment 1, while the random-feedback group showed no significant change. A second experiment supported learned decreases, but it reused nine participants and had no parallel random-feedback arm.

How to interpret the findings

Small healthy sample, one occipital volume of interest and short-term laboratory training. The full text notes possible parallel BOLD changes, post hoc rather than online linewidth correction, no online outlier or frequency/phase correction, motion-related confounding and uncertain generalizability to other regions or clinical populations.

Equipment and disclosures

Single-voxel proton fMRS on a Siemens Prisma 3 Tesla scanner with a 64-channel head/neck coil; 2-second PRESS scans

Supported by the Julitta und Richard Müller Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Emmy Noether program, grant 491290285. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

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