2011/04/26 by Anne Battisti‐Charbonney, Joseph A. Fisher, James Duffin · 299 citations
Chemistry · Medicine · #Anesthesia #Blood pressure #Carbon dioxide #Cardiology #Cerebral blood flow #Chemistry #Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control #Heart rate #Hypoxia (environmental) #Internal medicine #Ischemia #Mean arterial pressure #Medicine #Middle cerebral artery #Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques #Oxygen #Perfusion #Traumatic Brain Injury and Neurovascular Disturbances #Vasodilation
paper · open access · doi:10.1113/jphysiol.2011.206052
published in The Journal of Physiology 589(12), 3039-3048 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2011/04/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Carbon dioxide (CO2) increases cerebral blood flow and arterial blood pressure. Cerebral blood flow increases not only due to the vasodilating effect of CO2 but also because of the increased perfusion pressure after autoregulation is exhausted. Our objective was to measure the responses of both middle cerebral artery velocity (MCAv) and mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) to CO2 in human subjects using Duffin-type isoxic rebreathing tests. Comparisons of isoxic hyperoxic with isoxic hypoxic tests enabled the effect of oxygen tension to be determined. During rebreathing the MCAv response to CO2 was sigmoidal below a discernible threshold CO2 tension, increasing from a hypocapnic minimum to a hypercapnic maximum. In most subjects this threshold corresponded with the CO2 tension at which MAP began to increase. Above this threshold both MCAv and MAP increased linearly with CO2 tension. The sigmoidal MCAv response was centred at a CO2 tension close to normal resting values (overall mean 36 mmHg). While hypoxia increased the hypercapnic maximum percentage increase in MCAv with CO2 (overall means from76.5 to 108%) it did not affect other sigmoid parameters. Hypoxia also did not alter the supra-threshold MCAv and MAP responses to CO2 (overall mean slopes 5.5% mmHg⁻¹ and 2.1 mmHg mmHg⁻¹, respectively), but did reduce the threshold (overall means from 51.5 to 46.8 mmHg). We concluded that in the MCAv response range below the threshold for the increase of MAP with CO2, the MCAv measurement reflects vascular reactivity to CO2 alone at a constant MAP.