%0 Journal Article %@ 1053-8119 %A Kolyva, C %A Ghosh, A %A Tachtsidis, I %A Highton, D %A Cooper, CE %A Smith, M %A Elwell, CE %D 2014 %F discovery:1395037 %J Neuroimage %K Cytochrome c oxidase; Hypoxia; Hyperoxia; Hypocapnia; Hypercapnia; Near-infrared spectroscopy; %N 1 %P 234-244 %T Cytochrome c oxidase response to changes in cerebral oxygen delivery in the adult brain shows higher brain-specificity than haemoglobin %U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1395037/ %V 85 %X The redox state of cerebral mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase monitored with near-infrared spectroscopy (Δ[oxCCO]) is a signal with strong potential as a non-invasive, bedside biomarker of cerebral metabolic status. We hypothesised that the higher mitochondrial density of brain compared to skin and skull would lead to evidence of brain-specificity of the Δ[oxCCO] signal when measured with a multi-distance near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Measurements of Δ[oxCCO] as well as of concentration changes in oxygenated (Δ[HbO2]) and deoxygenated haemoglobin (Δ[HHb]) were taken at multiple source-detector distances during systemic hypoxia and hypocapnia (decrease in cerebral oxygen delivery), and hyperoxia and hypercapnia (increase in cerebral oxygen delivery) from 15 adult healthy volunteers. Increasing source-detector spacing is associated with increasing light penetration depth and thus higher sensitivity to cerebral changes. An increase in Δ[oxCCO] was observed during the challenges that increased cerebral oxygen delivery and the opposite was observed when cerebral oxygen delivery decreased. A consistent pattern of statistically significant increasing amplitude of the Δ[oxCCO] response with increasing light penetration depth was observed in all four challenges, a behaviour that was distinctly different from that of the haemoglobin chromophores, which did not show this statistically significant depth gradient. This depth-dependence of the Δ[oxCCO] signal corroborates the notion of higher concentrations of CCO being present in cerebral tissue compared to extracranial components and highlights the value of NIRS-derived Δ[oxCCO] as a brain-specific signal of cerebral metabolism, superior in this aspect to haemoglobin. %Z © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.