Relationship between central autonomic effective connectivity and heart rate variability: A Resting-state fMRI dynamic causal modeling study
Liangsuo Ma,
Larry D. Keen, II,
Joel L. Steinberg,
David Eddie,
Alex Tan,
Lori Keyser-Marcus,
Antonio Abbate,
F. Gerard Moeller
Affiliations
Liangsuo Ma
Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, 203 East Cary Street, Suite 202, Richmond 23219, VA, United States; Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States; Corresponding author.
Larry D. Keen, II
Department of Psychology, Virginia State University, VA, United States
Joel L. Steinberg
Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, 203 East Cary Street, Suite 202, Richmond 23219, VA, United States; Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States; C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States
David Eddie
Recovery Research Institute, Center for Addiction Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, MA, United States; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, MA, United States
Alex Tan
Berne Cardiovascular Research Center, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States
Lori Keyser-Marcus
Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States
Antonio Abbate
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, MA, United States
F. Gerard Moeller
Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies, Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, 203 East Cary Street, Suite 202, Richmond 23219, VA, United States; Department of Psychiatry, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States; Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States; Department of Neurology, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States; C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research, Virginia Commonwealth University, VA, United States
The central autonomic network (CAN) serves as a regulatory hub with top-down regulatory control and integration of bottom-up physiological feedback via the autonomic nervous system. Heart rate variability (HRV)—the time variance of the heart's beat-to-beat intervals—is an index of the CAN's affective and behavioral regulatory capacity. Although neural functional connectivities that are associated with HRV and CAN have been well studied, no published report to date has studied effective (directional) connectivities (EC) that are associated with HRV and CAN. Better understanding of neural EC in the brain has the potential to improve our understanding of how the CAN sub-regions regulate HRV. To begin to address this knowledge gap, we employed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) with parametric empirical Bayes analyses in 34 healthy adults (19 females; mean age= 32.68 years [SD= 14.09], age range 18–68 years) to examine the bottom-up and top-down neural circuits associated with HRV. Throughout the whole brain, we identified 12 regions associated with HRV. DCM analyses revealed that the ECs from the right amygdala to the anterior cingulate cortex and to the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex had a negative linear relationship with HRV and a positive linear relationship with heart rate. These findings suggest that ECs from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex may represent a neural circuit associated with regulation of cardiodynamics.
