Department of Radiology, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China.
Department of Radiology, Tibet Military General Hospital, Lhasa, Tibet, China.
Sci Rep. 2017 Feb 27;7:43246. doi: 10.1038/srep43246.
Changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF) may occur with acute exposure to high altitude; however, the CBF of the brain parenchyma has not been studied to date. In this study, identical magnetic resonance scans using arterial spin labeling (ASL) were performed to study the haemodynamic changes at both sea level and high altitude. We found that with acute exposure to high altitude, the CBF in acute mountain sickness (AMS) subjects was higher (P < 0.05), while the CBF of non-AMS subjects was lower (P > 0.05) compared with those at sea level. Moreover, magnetic resonance angiography in both AMS and non-AMS subjects showed a significant increase in the cross-sectional areas of the internal carotid, basilar, and middle cerebral arteries on the first day at high altitude. These findings support that AMS may be related to increased CBF rather than vasodilation; these results contradict most previous studies that reported no relationship between CBF changes and the occurrence of AMS. This discrepancy may be attributed to the use of ASL for CBF measurement at both sea level and high altitude in this study, which has substantial advantages over transcranial Doppler for the assessment of CBF.
急性暴露于高海拔地区可能会导致脑血流量 (CBF) 发生变化；然而，迄今为止尚未研究脑实质的 CBF。在这项研究中，使用动脉自旋标记 (ASL) 进行了相同的磁共振扫描，以研究海平面和高海拔地区的血液动力学变化。我们发现，在急性高海拔暴露下，急性高原病 (AMS) 患者的 CBF 更高（P<0.05），而无 AMS 患者的 CBF 则更低（P>0.05），与海平面相比。此外，在 AMS 和非 AMS 患者中，磁共振血管造影显示，在高海拔的第一天，颈内动脉、基底动脉和大脑中动脉的横截面积显著增加。这些发现支持 AMS 可能与 CBF 增加而不是血管扩张有关；这些结果与大多数先前报道 CBF 变化与 AMS 发生之间无关系的研究相矛盾。这种差异可能归因于本研究在海平面和高海拔地区均使用 ASL 测量 CBF，这在评估 CBF 方面比经颅多普勒具有明显优势。
