Hey people! Time for an #introduction! I lead a research group at the University of Sussex, UK. I’m interested in how the #brain controls its #blood flow, and what happens in the brain when there is a slight disruption in this energy supply, as happens before people develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. We image neurons, glia and blood vessels in mouse brain to try to understand what they do in different situations and when they go wrong. 1/4
We recently found lower blood oxygenation and #neurovascular function in the #hippocampus compared to #neocortex, which might explain why the hippocampus is sensitive to hypoxia and affected early in Alzheimer’s disease: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23508-y. 2/4
@catherinenhall That's a really interesting finding! I'm curious about two things:
Do you have clues about the cause of the lower blood oxygenation?
If it holds in humans as well, could it be affecting fMRI readings of hippocampus? It has been a notoriously hard area to image, partially because it's deep in the brain, but could it be partially due to just lower general oxygenation??
@neurolili we think more oxygen might be extracted from blood in the hippocampus (vascular density is lower there) but we don’t know for sure if the feeding vessels are equally oxygenated as those feeding cortex. We don’t know if that per se would make it harder to see BOLD signals there, however we also found weaker neurovascular coupling in the hippocampus - vessels dilated less frequently to local neuronal activity and that certainly would make it harder to see BOLD.