In addition to the well-established origin in cardiac and respiratory cycles, CSF pulsations may also result from the much slower variations in vascular tone associated with cerebral blood flow (CBF) autoregulation. Using a novel quantitative MRI approach, we measured CSF flow velocities and displaced volumes resulting from these three mechanisms in 12 healthy human controls. We found the autoregulatory effects to be a major factor, with associated CSF velocities comparable to and displaced volumes an order of magnitude larger than the cardio-respiratory effects. This may be an important mechanism underlying the CSF oscillations recently observed in resting-state fMRI.
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