title: Altered cerebral blood flow and cerebrovascular function after voluntary exercise in adult mice.
abstract: The beneficial effects of physical exercise on brain health are well documented, yet how exercise modulates cerebrovascular function is not well understood. This study used continuous arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging with a hypercapnic challenge to examine changes in cerebral blood flow and vascular function after voluntary exercise in healthy, adult mice. Thirty exercise mice and twenty-one control mice were imaged prior to the start of the exercise regime (at 12 weeks of age) and after 4 weeks of voluntary exercise. After the second in vivo imaging session, we performed high-resolution ex vivo anatomical brain imaging to correlate the structural brain changes with functional measures of flow and vascular reserve. We found that exercise resulted in increases in the normocapnic and hypercapnic blood flow in the hippocampus. Moreover, the change in normocapnic blood flow between pre-exercise and post-exercise was positively correlated to the hippocampal structure volume following exercise. There was no overall effect of voluntary exercise on blood flow in the motor cortex. Surprisingly, the hypercapnic hippocampal blood flow when measured prior to the start of exercise was predictive of subsequent exercise activity. Moreover, exercise was found to normalize this pre-existing difference in hypercapnic blood flow between mice.
authors.affiliation: Mouse Imaging Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, 25 Orde Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 2H7, Canada. lindsay.cahill@sickkids.ca.
authors.forename: Lindsay S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Cahill
authors.affiliation: Mouse Imaging Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, 25 Orde Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 2H7, Canada.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bishop
authors.affiliation: Mouse Imaging Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, 25 Orde Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 2H7, Canada.
authors.forename: Lisa M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Gazdzinski
authors.affiliation: Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Adrienne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dorr
authors.affiliation: Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Bojana
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Stefanovic
authors.affiliation: Mouse Imaging Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, 25 Orde Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 2H7, Canada.|Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: John G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Sled
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000378:metabolism*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000378:metabolism*; D010805:Physical Conditioning, Animal; D013113:Spin Labels
chemical_list: D013113:Spin Labels
keywords: Cerebral blood flow; Cerebrovascular function; Hippocampus; Mouse MRI; Voluntary exercise