Hippocampal Blood Flow after Twenty Minutes of Moderate-intensity Exercise

In this study we investigated whether a single session of moderate-intensity exercise was sufficient to induce changes in the cerebral vasculature using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We employed arterial spin labelling MRI to measure global and regional cerebral blood flow and arterial transit time before and after 20-minutes of cycling in healthy adults with 3 post-exercise timepoints (post1, post2, post3). The blood vessels’ ability to dilate, measured by cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to CO₂inhalation, was measured at baseline and 25-minutes post-exercise. 

Along with the raw ASL data at baseline and at the 3 post-exercise timepoints,  whole brain cerebral blood flow maps, arterial transit time maps, CVR maps, and R2 maps showing the CVR fitting to CO2 are provided; for each map type, 4 images  are provided for each participant (n=32) for the 4 separate timepoints (baseline, post1, post2, post3). Bash scripts and Matlab code used for the pre-processing of the dataset are provided and R code and bash scripts show the statistical analysis undertaken. A README.txt file details which order the various scripts should be run in to produce the whole-brain maps. 

Research results based upon these data are published at  https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhz104