To test the hypothesis that pulsing of intracranial pressure has an association with cognition, we measured cognitive score and pulsing of the tympanic membrane in 290 healthy subjects. This hypothesis was formed on the assumptions that large intracranial pressure pulses impair cognitive performance and tympanic membrane pulses reflect intracranial pressure pulses.

290 healthy subjects, aged 20–80 years, completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. Spontaneous tympanic membrane displacement during a heart cycle was measured from both ears in the sitting and supine position. We applied multiple linear regression, correcting for age, heart rate, and height, to test for an association between cognitive score and spontaneous tympanic membrane displacement. Significance was set at P < 0.0125 (Bonferroni correction.) A significant association was seen in the left supine position (p = 0.0076.) The association was not significant in the right ear supine (p = 0.28) or in either ear while sitting. Sub-domains of the cognitive assessment revealed that executive function, language and memory have been primarily responsible for this association. In conclusion, we have found that spontaneous pulses of the tympanic membrane are associated with cognitive performance and believe this reflects an association between cognitive performance and intracranial pressure pulses.

Cerebral autoregulation (CA) refers to the ability of the brain vasculature to control blood flow in the face of changing blood pressure. One of the methods commonly used to assess cerebral autoregulation, especially in participants at rest, is the analysis of phase derived from transfer function analysis (TFA), relating arterial blood pressure (ABP) to cerebral blood flow (CBF). This and other indexes of CA can provide consistent results when comparing groups of subjects (e.g. patients and healthy controls or normocapnia and hypercapnia) but can be quite variable within and between individuals. The objective of this paper is to present a novel parametric bootstrap method, used to estimate the sampling distribution and hence confidence intervals (CIs) of the mean phase estimate in the low-frequency band, in order to optimise estimation of measures of CA function and allow more robust inferences on the status of CA from individual recordings. A set of simulations was used to verify the proposed method under controlled conditions. In 20 healthy adult volunteers (age 25.53.5 years), ABP and CBF velocity (CBFV) were measured at rest, using a Finometer device and Transcranial Doppler (applied to the middle cerebral artery), respectively. For each volunteer, five individual recordings were taken on different days, each approximately 18 min long. Phase was estimated using TFA. Analysis of recorded data showed widely changing CIs over the duration of recordings, which could be reduced when noisy data and frequencies with low coherence were excluded from the analysis (Wilcoxon signed rank test= 0.0065). The TFA window-lengths of 50s gave smaller CIs than lengths of 100s (< 0.001) or 20s (< 0.001), challenging the usual recommendation of 100s. The method adds a much needed flexible statistical tool for CA analysis in individual recordings.

In this issue of Neuron, van Veluw et al. (2020) show that elimination of solutes from the brain along arterial walls is driven by low-frequency arteriolar oscillations and suggest that age-related reduction of this vasomotion may contribute to impaired clearance of Aβ.

Although previous studies have shown associations between patient symptoms/outcomes and the spontaneous tympanic membrane displacement (spTMD) pulse amplitude, the contribution of the underlying intracranial pressure (ICP) signal to the spTMD pulse remains largely unknown. We have assessed the relative contributions of ICP and arterial blood pressure (ABP) on spTMD at different frequencies in order to determine whether spTMD contains information about the ICP above and beyond that contained in the ABP.

Evoked tympanic membrane displacement (TMD) measurements, quantified by V , record small volume changes in the ear canal following stimulation of the acoustic reflex. V shows a correlation with intracranial pressure (ICP) and has been proposed as an option to non-invasively measure ICP. The spontaneous pulsing of the tympanic membrane, driven by the cardiovascular pulse, may contaminate the recordings and contribute to high measurement variability in some subjects. This study hypothesised that the larger the spontaneous vascular pulse, the larger the variability in V .

To test the hypothesis that pulsing of intracranial pressure has an association with cognition, we measured cognitive score and pulsing of the tympanic membrane in 290 healthy subjects. This hypothesis was formed on the assumptions that large intracranial pressure pulses impair cognitive performance and tympanic membrane pulses reflect intracranial pressure pulses. 290 healthy subjects, aged 20-80 years, completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. Spontaneous tympanic membrane displacement during a heart cycle was measured from both ears in the sitting and supine position. We applied multiple linear regression, correcting for age, heart rate, and height, to test for an association between cognitive score and spontaneous tympanic membrane displacement. Significance was set at  < 0.0125 (Bonferroni correction.) A significant association was seen in the left supine position ( = 0.0076.) The association was not significant in the right ear supine ( = 0.28) or in either ear while sitting. Sub-domains of the cognitive assessment revealed that executive function, language and memory have been primarily responsible for this association. In conclusion, we have found that spontaneous pulses of the tympanic membrane are associated with cognitive performance and believe this reflects an association between cognitive performance and intracranial pressure pulses.