Evaluation of the Acetazolamide Test

Abstract

Background and Purpose We evaluated the potential usefulness of the acetazolamide test by investigating whether acetazolamide vasoreactivity reflected the change in resting cerebral blood volume caused by compensatory vasodilation due to a decline in cerebral perfusion pressure. Methods We measured resting and acetazolamide-activated cerebral blood flow with a stable xenon-enhanced CT system and resting cerebral blood volume with the subtraction technique using contrast-enhanced CT in 30 patients with various diseases. These parameters were measured in the anterior, middle, and posterior cerebral arterial territories of both hemispheres separately. We evaluated the statistical relationships between resting cerebral blood volume and vasoreactivity in these three territories, and the significance of the correlations was tested by ANOVA/ANCOVA to adjust for the double entries. Results Significant negative linear relationships were demonstrated between the resting cerebral blood volume and the change in cereb...