Association between cardiorespiratory fitness and cerebrovascular reactivity to a breath-hold stimulus in older adults: influence of aerobic exercise training

Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to a physiological stimulus is a commonly used surrogate of cerebrovascular health. Cross-sectional studies using blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) neuroimaging demonstrated lower BOLD-CVR to hypercapnia among adults with high compared with lower cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) in contrast to transcranial Doppler studies. However, whether BOLD-CVR changes following chronic aerobic exercise in older, cognitively intact adults is unclear. This study evaluated relations between BOLD-CVR with CRF (VO2peak) using a cross-sectional and interventional study design. We hypothesized that 1) greater CRF would be associated with lower BOLD-CVR in older adults (n = 114; 65 +/- 6.5 yr) with a wide range of CRF and 2) BOLD-CVR would be attenuated after exercise training in a subset (n = 33) randomized to 3-mo of moderate- or light-intensity cycling. CVR was quantified as the change in the BOLD signal in response to acute hypercapnia using a blocked breath-hold design from a region-of-interest analysis for cortical networks. In the cross-sectional analysis, there was a quadratic relation between VO2peak (P = 0.03), but not linear (P = 0.87) and cortical BOLD-CVR. BOLD-CVR increased until a VO2peak similar to 28 mUkg/min after which BOLD-CVR declined. The nonlinear trend was consistent across all networks (P = 0.04-0.07). In the intervention, both the active and light-intensity exercise groups improved CRF similarly (6% vs. 10.8%, P = 0.28). The percent change in CRF was positively associated with change in BOLD-CVR in the default mode network only. These data suggest that BOLD-CVR is nonlinearly associated with CRF and that in lower-fit adults default mode network may be most sensitive to CRF-related increases in BOLD-CVR. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Earlier studies evaluating associations between cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) have demonstrated conflicting findings dependent on imaging modality or subject characteristics in individuals across a narrow range of CRF. This study demonstrates that CRF is nonlinearly associated with CVR measured by blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) fMRI in a large sample of middle-aged and older adults across a wide range of CRF, suggesting that conflicting prior findings are related to the range of CRFs studied.