Hussein A, Matthews JL, Syme C, et al. - Researchers evaluated the relationships between aortic stiffening (as measured using pulse wave velocity [PWV]) and rs-fMRI metrics. Cardiac MRI was used to estimate aortic PWV (an established indicator of whole-body vascular stiffness), as well as dual-echo pseudo-continuous arterial-spin labeling to measure BOLD and CBF dynamics simultaneously in a group of generally healthy adults. The study found that the higher aortic PWV is correlated with lower variance in the resting-state BOLD signal, higher PWV is also correlated with lower BOLD-based resting-state functional connectivity, regions displaying lower connectivity do not fully overlap with those showing lower BOLD variance with higher PWV, and CBF signal variance is a significant mediator of the above findings, only when averaged across regions-of-interest. Moreover, there was no significant relationship between BOLD signal variance and systolic blood pressure, which is also a known predictor of vascular stiffness.