Discussion of hypercapnia (breath holding) and other ways to potentially adjust the BOLD signal:

Bandettini PA, Wong EC (1997) A hypercapnia-based normalization method for improved spatial localization of human brain activation with fMRI. NMR Biomed 10:197-203.

Thomason ME, Foland LC, Glover GH (2007) Calibration of BOLD fMRI using breath holding reduces group variance during a cognitive task. Hum Brain Mapp 28:59-68.