Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is associated with an increased risk of stroke and dementia, being implicated in age-related cognitive decline. In this work, we investigate the potential of cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to provide sensitive biomarkers of SVD, by evaluating metrics extracted from breath-hold BOLD-fMRI in terms of their predictive power of cognitive impairment in a group of SVD patients. We modelled the breath-hold BOLD-fMRI response using a sinusoidal approach, and derived both CVR amplitude and delay-based maps. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that CVR metrics significantly contributed to explain cognitive impairments in working memory, long-term memory and executive function.
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