AccScience Publishing / BH / Volume 2 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.36922/bh.3956
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia in humans: Correlation analysis with breathing-specific heart rate

Jacopo P. Mortola1*
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1 Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Brain & Heart 2024, 2(4), 3956 https://doi.org/10.36922/bh.3956
Submitted: 17 June 2024 | Accepted: 29 October 2024 | Published: 2 December 2024
© 2024 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

In adult humans at rest, pulmonary ventilation and cardiac output share similar values, both approximately 5 L/min. Airflow is intermittent, with tidal volumes exceeding dead space, low breathing frequency (fresp), and zero air velocity at both end-inspiration and end-expiration. In contrast, the cardiac pump is in series with the vasculature, such that the small stroke volume and high heart rate (HR) (fh) allow for quasi-continuous blood flow. Based on experimental findings in dogs, it has been suggested that an elevated fh during inspiration (known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) decreases the disparity between air and blood flow patterns. Thus, one might hypothesize a positive correlation between the peak-trough difference of instantaneous fh (ΔHR’ = HR’peak – HR’trough) and the breathing-specific fh (fh/fresp). To test this hypothesis, we combined breath-by-breath data for ΔHR’ from several previous studies, resulting in a database of over 600 subjects. This extensive dataset allowed us to construct statistically meaningful correlations between ΔHR’ and variables associated with RSA (fh, fresp, HR’peak, and HR’trough). A strong statistically significant (r > 0.9) correlation between fh/fresp and ΔHR’ was observed. These findings support the hypothesis that RSA may be a mechanism for improving the match between the quasi-continuous blood flow and the intermittent airflow.

Keywords
Cardiac arrhythmia
Cardiorespiratory design
Parasympathetic control
Pulmonary gas exchange
Ventilation-perfusion matching
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares no competing interests in this article.
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