Local cerebral blood volume response to carbon dioxide in man.

We used an emission tomographic brain scanner to investigate the relationship between local cerebral blood volume (LCBV) and arterial blood carbon dioxide tension (PaCO2) in normal awake man. Measurements were made separately in three dimensions in various regions of grey and white matter, and the resting LCBV as well as the difference in sensitivity among these regions were compared. Over the range of PaCO2 studied (20-42 torr), the response of both the grey matter and the white matter to carbon dioxide was linear. The LCBV sensitivity of the grey matter to changes in PaCO2 was 0.053 ml/100 g per torr PaCO2 and in the white matter this sensitivity was 0.046 ml/100 g per torr PaCO2. These sensitivities were found not to be significantly different, yielding a slope of 0.049 ml/100 g per torr PaCO2 for the LCBV-PaCO2 curve for the entire brain. This is in excellent agreement with the other data for the whole brain. The resting cerebral blood volume of the grey matter at a PaCO2 of 34.4 torr, which was the average resting arterial carbon dioxide tension of the subjects, was 5.0 ml/100 g and was significantly higher than for white matter, which was 3.6 ml/100 g. At the local level, the cerebral blood volume of the frontal cortex is significantly less than that of the thalamus, whereas the frontoparietal cortex in the region of the sylvian fissure has a local cerebral blood volume significantly greater than that of the thalamus.