Alberto Merola1, Michael A Germuska1, Esther AH Warnert1, Sharmila Khot1,2, Daniel Helme2, Lewys Richmond2, Kevin Murphy1, and Richard G Wise1
1CUBRIC, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom, 2Department of Anesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Caffeine acute effects on oxygen metabolism are
not well characterized across the brain with MRI. We aim at measuring these in a double-blind,
crossover, placebo-controlled study on sixteen healthy, moderate caffeine
consumers using a dual calibrated fMRI approach and a novel forward estimation model.
Results show spatial variations in OEF0, CBF, CVR,
venous CBV and CMRO2 across grey matter at different levels of
resolution (grey matter, ROI and voxel), in agreement with most of the literature
findings. Therefore we propose this approach as the first viable method to
assess the effects of drugs on brain metabolism with a voxel-wise resolution.
