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Abstract #1733

What you see is not what you get: BOLD signal increases with age in children may be the result of increased neuronal-vascular coupling and not increased neuronal activity

Vincent Jerome Schmithorst 1,2 , Jennifer Vannest 2 , Gregory Lee 2 , Luis Hernandez-Garcia 3 , Elena Plante 4 , Akila Rajagopal 2 , and Scott Holland 2

1 Radiology, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, Pittsburgh, PA, United States, 2 Radiology, Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States, 3 Radiology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, 4 Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Arizona, AZ, United States

Neuronal-vascular coupling is a likely confound in developmental fMRI studies. We investigated the etiology of increasing BOLD signal with age during the developmental period (ages 3-18) using a simultaneous functional ASL-BOLD acquisition and a narrative comprehension task. Results show that while a region (left STG) of the brain exhibits increases in BOLD signal with age, these increases are the result of increased neuronal-vascular coupling and not increased neuronal activity. In fact, CMRO2 is actually found to decrease with age. This finding suggests results of increased BOLD signal or inter-regional correlations with age need to be interpreted with caution.

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