OLBNP amplitudes from 10 mmHg22 up to 120 mmHg17 have been used to augment arterial pressure fluctuations, but 30 mmHg OLBNP is sufficient23,24 and not beyond the regulatory capacity of the cerebrovasculature.17 This level of OLBNP results in blood pressure oscillations that are about 15-20 mmHg in magnitude at 0.03 Hz, which is not greater than the blood pressure changes occurring when going from seated to standing.25 There are some limitations to the range within which OLBNP can generate arterial pressure fluctuations. Autoregulation is only active at ~0.07 Hz and slower, so the upper limit is not an issue. However the difficulty in generating low frequency oscillations below 0.03 Hz is that the cardiovascular system counter-regulates against the LBNP-induced arterial pressure changes before the cycle is finished. As Figure 4 shows, at 0.025 Hz OLBNP we actually see the largest peak in the arterial pressure oscillations at 0.05 Hz. While the frequency response of cerebral autoregulation can be characterized from 0.03 Hz-0.08 Hz to define the time scales within which autoregulation is active,23,24 0.03 Hz and 0.08 Hz OLBNP are sufficient since they represent a range of autoregulatory function (i.e., a pronounced autoregulatory region to none or a modest one).
OLBNP generates larger fluctuations in arterial pressure as the frequency of negative pressure oscillations become slower. Figure 5 shows the arterial pressure and consequent cerebral blood flow fluctuations with OLBNP from 0.08 Hz (12.5 sec cycles) to 0.03 Hz (33 sec cycles). At the higher frequencies, cerebral blood flow fluctuates in concert with arterial pressure. The PPR demonstrates this; there is a proportional linear relation between arterial pressure and cerebral blood flow at the higher frequencies of 0.08 Hz, 0.07 Hz (14 sec cycles), and 0.06 Hz (16.6 sec cycles). At slower frequencies of OLBNP, though arterial pressure fluctuations become larger, fluctuations in cerebral blood flow are progressively more effectively dampened. Hence, the PPR shows an increasingly more prominent autoregulatory region at OLBNP frequencies from 0.05 Hz (20 sec cycles), to 0.04 Hz (25 sec cycles), to 0.03 Hz. In the example shown, at 0.03 Hz, the PPR curve clearly resembles the “classic autoregulatory curve” described by Lassen (Figure 1). We have previously shown that this observation cannot be explained simply by the increase in magnitude of arterial pressure fluctuations as the frequency of oscillations become slower. We have previously applied PPR to data from 48 individuals during different magnitudes of OLBNP (thus, different magnitude of pressure fluctuations).19 While we did not explicitly explore a potential relation between autoregulatory range and the magnitude of pressure fluctuations, we reported that the variation in autoregulatory range was only ~6%. Thus, our prior results clearly show that the change in PPR curve with frequency cannot be fully explained by a change in the magnitude of pressure fluctuations. In the same study, we assessed whether the PPR characterization of autoregulation is reproducible across separate sessions. This analysis showed that the slope of the autoregulatory range during 0.03 Hz OLBNP did not change (Lin’s Concordance = 0.96, p < 0.001) and thus the nonlinear pressure-flow relation is consistent across study days.
Although the cerebrovascular bed is well innervated by sympathetic nerve fibers, their role in autoregulation has not been widely accepted.26 Therefore, some of our previous work explored the potential role of the sympathetic nervous system in cerebrovascular autoregulation.24 We found a clear role for the sympathetic system in regulating cerebral flow, but we were not able to characterize how the relationship changed with removal of sympathetic effects due to the limitations of linear methods for characterizing autoregulation. Figure 6 shows the results from PPR application to data before (baseline) and after sympathetic blockade during 0.05 Hz. The overall curve becomes markedly more linear. Moreover, PPR analysis of 0.03 Hz data where autoregulation is most apparent showed that the range of the autoregulatory region remains unchanged, but the slope within that region increases, reflecting less effective autoregulation (Figure 7).

Figure 1. The 'classic' autoregulatory curve derived from the relationship between static increases and decreases in pressure and steady state cerebral blood flow. A region of unchanging flow despite changing pressure (i.e., slope = 0) is bounded by regions wherein increasing and decreasing pressures result in proportional cerebral blood flow changes.

Figure 2. The preprocessing necessary to perform PPR analysis. Signals are first decimated to 5 Hz and then band-pass filtered at the frequency of OLBNP (±0.005 Hz).

Figure 3. Parameters of the cerebral autoregulation curve derived from PPR analysis of arterial pressure and cerebral blood flow during 0.03 Hz OLBNP.

Figure 4. Power spectrum shows the magnitude of fluctuations in arterial pressure when OLBNP frequency is below 0.03 Hz (33-second cycle). Note that there are two large peaks in the arterial pressure spectral power at 0.025 and 0.05 Hz (40 and 20 sec cycles), however there is only a single peak in the LBNP spectral power at 0.025 Hz. Moreover, the largest fluctuation in pressure is at 0.05 Hz and would confound the interpretation of the cerebral blood flow responses.

Figure 5. Example of the effects of OLBNP from 0.08 to 0.03 Hz on arterial pressure and cerebral blood flow. Arterial pressure fluctuations become larger with slower OLBNP whereas cerebral blood flow fluctuations become smaller. This autoregulatory function is described by the results of the PPR analysis shown in the bottom panels. The autoregulatory region in cerebral blood flow becomes progressively more pronounced with slower OLBNP.

Figure 6. Individual and averaged PPR autoregulatory curves from 0.05 Hz OLBNP data in subjects before (baseline) and after sympathetic blockade. Note that the loss of the narrow autoregulatory region after sympathetic blockade.

Figure 7. Average of the PPR parameters from 0.03 Hz OLBNP data before and after sympathetic blockade. Sympathetic blockade had a pronounced effect on the cerebral autoregulation curve within the autoregulatory range, markedly increasing the slope (i.e., more proportional cerebral flow changes with pressure changes).