Fierstra J, et al. - The objectives of this research are to study twelve subjects with untreated brain diffuse glioma and twelve healthy controls with quantitative fMRI, to evaluate cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) impairment and ascertain its distribution throughout the brain. The current study showed that the patients with brain diffuse glioma show intralesional and whole brain impaired CVR with severity correlating to tumor volume. Quantitative fMRI may be entertained to study antitumor therapy effectiveness by tracking CVR changes and may have a complementary role to better interpret BOLD related neurovascular uncoupling.

Methods

• For this research, they designed a prospective case-control study.
• In this study, quantitative CVR measurements were derived from BOLD fMRI volumes amid standardized iso-oxic changes in carbon dioxide.
• Whole brain CVR was evaluated with additionally detailed examinations utilizing particular tumor and tissue masks and compared to datasets of healthy controls.

Results

• They observed whole brain CVR was significantly impaired compared to healthy controls (0.11 ± 0.10 versus 0.28 ± 0.8, p < 0.01).
• In this study, all diffuse glioma patients showed even more severely impaired intralesional CVR (mean 0.01 ± 0.06).
• Increasing tumor volume significantly correlated with severity of intralesional CVR impairment (p < 0.05, R² = 0.38), and whole brain CVR impairment (p < 0.05, R² = 0.55).