Heart Rate Variability: New Perspectives on Physiological Mechanisms, Assessment of Self-regulatory Capacity, and Health risk

By Rollin McCraty, F. Shaffer. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2015

920 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Heart rate variability, the change in the time intervals between adjacent heartbeats, is an emergent property of interdependent regulatory systems that operates on different time scales to adapt to environmental and psychological challenges. This article briefly reviews neural regulation of the heart and offers some new perspectives on mechanisms underlying the very low frequency rhythm of heart rate variability. Interpretation of heart rate variability rhythms in the context of health risk and physiological and psychological self-regulatory capacity assessment is discussed. The cardiovascular regulatory centers in the spinal cord and medulla integrate inputs from higher brain centers with afferent cardiovascular system inputs to adjust heart rate and blood pressure via sympathetic and parasympathetic efferent pathways. We also discuss the intrinsic cardiac nervous system and the heart-brain connection pathways, through which afferent information can influence activity in the subcortical, frontocortical, and motor cortex areas. In addition, the use of realtime HRV feedback to increase self-regulatory capacity is reviewed. We conclude that the heart's rhythms are characterized by both complexity and stability over longer time scales that reflect both physiological and psychological functional status of these internal self-regulatory systems.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, Complementary and alternative medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/887347adc849dfc87fac623b3f97bff9090e10f9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. J. Ginsberg
2. Sylvain Laborde
3. Julian F. Thayer
4. E. Mosley
5. F. Shaffer

In Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine

1. J. Ginsberg
2. Sylvain Laborde
3. E. Mosley
4. F. Shaffer
5. Julian F. Thayer
6. Bruce S. McEwen
7. G. Billman
8. Richard D. Lane

In Complementary and alternative medicine

1. Julian F. Thayer

Citations in the corpus

• Heart Rate Variability and Cardiac Vagal Tone in Psychophysiological Research – Recommendations for Experiment Planning, Data Analysis, and Data Reporting (2017, background): “This is of particular interest, given the association of the parasympathetic nervous system with many aspects relevant for psychophysiology, such as self-regulation mechanisms linked to cognitive, affective, social, and health phenomena (Porges, 2007; Thayer et al., 2009; McCraty and Shaffer, 2015).”
• An Overview of Heart Rate Variability Metrics and Norms (2017, background): “This region was previously called the baroreceptor range because it mainly reflects baroreceptor activity during resting conditions (1).”