A healthy heart is not a metronome: an integrative review of the heart's anatomy and heart rate variability

By F. Shaffer, Rollin McCraty, Christopher L. Zerr. Frontiers in Psychology, 2014

1,726 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heart rate variability (HRV), the change in the time intervals between adjacent heartbeats, is an emergent property of interdependent regulatory systems that operate on different time scales to adapt to challenges and achieve optimal performance. This article briefly reviews neural regulation of the heart, and its basic anatomy, the cardiac cycle, and the sinoatrial and atrioventricular pacemakers. The cardiovascular regulation center in the medulla integrates sensory information and input from higher brain centers, and afferent cardiovascular system inputs to adjust heart rate and blood pressure via sympathetic and parasympathetic efferent pathways. This article reviews sympathetic and parasympathetic influences on the heart, and examines the interpretation of HRV and the association between reduced HRV, risk of disease and mortality, and the loss of regulatory capacity. This article also discusses the intrinsic cardiac nervous system and the heart-brain connection, through which afferent information can influence activity in the subcortical and frontocortical areas, and motor cortex. It also considers new perspectives on the putative underlying physiological mechanisms and properties of the ultra-low-frequency (ULF), very-low-frequency (VLF), low-frequency (LF), and high-frequency (HF) bands. Additionally, it reviews the most common time and frequency domain measurements as well as standardized data collection protocols. In its final section, this article integrates Porges' polyvagal theory, Thayer and colleagues' neurovisceral integration model, Lehrer et al.'s resonance frequency model, and the Institute of HeartMath's coherence model. The authors conclude that a coherent heart is not a metronome because its rhythms are characterized by both complexity and stability over longer time scales. Future research should expand understanding of how the heart and its intrinsic nervous system influence the brain.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11e489cac08749b7d90a24fffffdbe6342554381

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Citations in the corpus

An Overview of Heart Rate Variability Metrics and Norms (2017, methodology): “003 Hz) requires a recording period of at least 24 h (12) and is highly correlated with the SDANN time-domain index (44).”
Heart Rate Variability in Psychology: A Review of HRV Indices and an Analysis Tutorial (2021, methodology): “is more influenced by the PNS activity and hence is often used to estimate the vagally mediated fluctuations in HR [19,48]).”
Heart Rate Variability and Cardiac Vagal Tone in Psychophysiological Research – Recommendations for Experiment Planning, Data Analysis, and Data Reporting (2017, methodology): “The percentage of successive normal sinus RR intervals more than 50 ms (pNN50) is correlated with RMSSD and HF power and thus supposed to reflect also vagal tone (Shaffer et al., 2014).”