To autoregulate or not to autoregulate--that is no longer the question

In the late 1970s, high cerebral blood flow was perceived as a cause of intracranial hemorrhage in the preterm infant. Intracranial hemorrhage was diagnosed by computed tomography and ultrasound found to be frequent not only in babies who died. Hemorrhage was soon linked to cerebral palsy in survivors. The analogy was hypertensive hemorrhagic stroke in the adult. Cerebral hemorrhage was perceived as the major (preventable) cause of brain injury in the preterm baby. An immature cerebral autoregulation or a vulnerability of the autoregulation exposed by preceding hypoxia or ischemia therefore became a focus of neonatal brain research in the 1980s. Over the years the focus has changed, first to the pathogenesis of hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, then to the effects of pCO(2), and now 30 years later to a more comprehensive, less clearly hypothesis-driven exploration of the multitude of factors involved in cerebral blood flow and oxygenation. Meanwhile, some basic questions regarding autoregulation remain unanswered, and some concepts from the 1970s still direct clinical practice.