High spontaneous fluctuation in arterial blood pressure improves the assessment of cerebral autoregulation

Cerebral autoregulation maintains a relatively constant blood flow despite changes of blood pressure in the brain. Linear models have been extensively applied to identify this mechanism, using spontaneous arterial blood pressure (ABP) fluctuation as input and cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) change as output. Although valuable measurements have been achieved by these models, accuracy and consistency are of great concern due to the large variability of results. We therefore investigated whether more reliable measurements can be achieved by selecting only those recordings (or parts of recordings) with relatively high spontaneous variability of ABP. Twenty-four recordings, 7 from hypercapnia and 17 from normocapnia, of ABP and CBFV from 9 healthy adults were analyzed. Two conventional autoregulatory parameters were used to assess cerebral autoregulation. In the absence of a 'gold' standard for the study of dynamic cerebral autoregulation, lower variability of the parameters and higher correlation with pCO(2) were considered as criteria for identifying improved measures of autoregulation. Both significantly lower variability of the parameters, and higher correlation between the parameters and pCO(2) were achieved from the data with higher variability of blood pressure. We therefore conclude that ABP with high variability may effectively stimulate regulatory response in blood flow resulting in improved assessment of cerebral autoregulation.