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Association Between Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Cerebrovascular Reactivity to a Breath Hold Stimulus in Older Adults: Influence of Aerobic Exercise Training
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Association Between Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Cerebrovascular Reactivity to a Breath Hold Stimulus in Older Adults: Influence of Aerobic Exercise Training

Lyndsey E DuBose, Timothy B Weng, Gary L Pierce, Conner Wharff, Lauren Reist, Chase Hamilton, Abby O'Deen, Kaitlyn M Dubishar, Abbi D Lane-Cordova and Michelle W Voss
Journal of applied physiology (1985), Vol.132(6), pp.1468-1479
04/28/2022
DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00599.2021
PMCID: PMC9208436
PMID: 35482329
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9208436View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to a physiological stimulus is a commonly used surrogate of cerebrovascular health. Cross-sectional studies using Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) neuroimaging demonstrated lower BOLD-CVR to hypercapnia among adults with high compared with lower cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) in contrast to transcranial Doppler studies. However, whether BOLD-CVR changes following chronic aerobic exercise in older, cognitively intact adults are unclear. This study evaluated relations between BOLD-CVR with CRF (VO ) using a cross-sectional and interventional study design. We hypothesized that 1) greater CRF would be associated with lower BOLD-CVR in older adults (n=114; 65±6.5 years) with a wide range of CRF; 2) BOLD-CVR would be attenuated after exercise training in a subset (n=33) randomized to 3-months of moderate or light intensity cycling. CVR was quantified as the change in the BOLD signal in response to acute hypercapnia using a blocked breath-hold design from a region-of-interest analysis for cortical networks. In the cross-sectional analysis, there was a quadratic relation between VO (p=0.03), but not linear (p=0.87), and cortical BOLD-CVR. BOLD-CVR increased until a VO ~28 ml/kg/min after which BOLD-CVR declined. The nonlinear trend was consistent across all networks (p-value=0.04-0.07). In the intervention, both the active and light intensity exercise groups improved CRF similarly (6% vs. 10.8%, p=0.28). The percent change in CRF was positively associated with change in BOLD-CVR in the default mode network only. These data suggest that BOLD-CVR is non-linearly associated with CRF and that in lower-fit adults default mode network may be most sensitive to CRF-related increases in BOLD-CVR.
Aging Brain Cerebrovascular reactivity Cardiorespiratory fitness Aerobic exercise training

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