Unveiling extracellular inorganic phosphate signals from blood in human cardiac 31P NMR spectra.

31P NMR spectra of the human heart are usually contaminated by signals that originate from blood. The main blood signals are 2,3-diphosphoglycerate (2,3-DPG), which overlap and sometimes obscure the signal of myocardial inorganic phosphate used to calculate intracellular pH and to monitor metabolic changes in the heart. In this work we demonstrate, first, that even without proton decoupling the resolution of such spectra can be high enough to evaluate intracellular inorganic phosphate of myocardium in about 70% of the spectra and, second, that extracellular inorganic phosphate from blood contributes a signal in the chemical shift region of the 2-phosphate signal of 2,3-DPG.