Dynamic cerebral autoregulation in subjects with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and controls: evidence for increased peripheral vascular resistance with possible predictive value.

Cerebrovascular dysfunction plays a role not only in vascular causes of cognitive impairment but also in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We hypothesized that cerebral autoregulation is impaired in patients with AD compared to subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and controls. Dynamic cerebral autoregulation (dCA) was investigated in 17 AD patients, 19 MCI subjects, and 20 controls (C).

Dynamic cerebral autoregulation: different signal processing methods without influence on results and reproducibility.

Cerebral autoregulation controls cerebral blood flow under changing cerebral perfusion pressure. Standards for measurement and analysis of dynamic cerebral autoregulation (dCA) are lacking. In this study, dCA reproducibility, quantified by intraclass correlation coefficient, is evaluated for different methodological approaches of transfer function analysis (TFA) and compared with multimodal pressure flow analysis (MMPF).