**Please let me know of errors or omissions!**
This post is a work-in-progress. It will be updated based on feedback. I will remove (draft) from the title when I consider this version to be complete.
A recent conversation on Twitter led to the suggestion that someone compile a list of physiological effects of concern for BOLD. That is, a list of potentially confounding physiological changes that could arise sympathetically in an fMRI experiment, such as altered heart rate due to the stress of a task, or that could exist as a systematic difference between groups. What follows is the result of a PubMed literature search (mostly just the abstracts) where I have tried to identify either recent review articles or original research that can be used as starting points for learning more about candidate effects. Hopefully you can then determine whether a particular factor might be of concern for your experiment.
This is definitely not a comprehensive list of all literature pertaining to all potential physiological confounds in fMRI, and I apologize if your very important contribution didn't make it into the post. Also, please note that I am not a physiologist so if I go seriously off piste in interpreting the literature, please forgive me and then correct my course. I would like to hear from you (comments below, or via Twitter) if I have omitted critical references or effects from the list, or if I have misinterpreted something. As far as possible I've tried to restrict the review to work in humans unless there was nothing appropriate, in which case I've included some animal studies if I think they are directly relevant. I'll try to keep this post up-to-date as new studies come out and as people let me know about papers I've missed. As it says at the top, I'll consider this a draft post pending feedback. Subsequent posts will be designated with a version number.
A final caution before we begin. It occurs to me that some people will take this list as (further) proof that all fMRI experiments are hopelessly flawed and will use it as ammunition. At the other extreme there will be people who see this list as baseless scare-mongering. How you use the list is entirely up to you, but my intent is to provide cautious fMRI scientists with a mechanism to (re)consider potential physiologic confounds in their experiments, and perhaps stimulate the collection of parallel data that might add power to those experiments.
Getting into BOLD physiology
There are some good recent articles that introduce the physiological artifacts of prime concern. Tom Liu has reviewed neurovascular factors in resting-state functional MRI and shows how detectable BOLD signals arise from physiological changes in the first place. Kevin Murphy et al. then review some of the most common confounds in resting-state fMRI and cover a few ways these spurious signal changes can be characterized and even removed from data. Finally, Dan Handwerker et al. consider some of the factors causing hemodynamic variations within and, in particular, between subjects
Once you start really looking into this stuff it can be hard not to get despondent. Think of the large number of potential manipulations as opportunities, not obstacles! Perhaps let The Magnetic Fields get you in the mood with their song, "I don't like your (vascular) tone." Then read on. It's a long list.
