Effect of Triglyceride Levels on Methyl and Methylene Envelope Line Widths in Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Human Plasma

To the Editor: Since the publication of our article in the Journal¹ it has become apparent that hypertriglyceridemia can cause false positive results when our method of detecting cancer by water-suppressed proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of plasma is used.²³ Mims et al. have recently reemphasized this important fact.⁴ When this became apparent, we developed a new method to distinguish positive results due to hypertriglyceridemia from those due to cancer. This method is based on C-13 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy of the same plasma sample.⁵ It is our experience and that of other groups²³ that triglyceride levels of 190.