“…Grouping of cohorts was varied depending on the study objective. Eight studies grouped participants by cognitive status e.g., controls vs. types of CI (MCI/non-amnesic mild CI (naMCI) and amnesic mild CI (aMCI) [3,4,11,13,24,38,40,43]), four studies by HRV parameters e.g., quartiles of RMSSD [8,32,41,42], and four had no grouping [2,9,10,39]. The remaining study grouped participants based on the presence or absence of white matter lesions on MRI -the extent of which has been found to be independently associated with decreased HRV in both time and frequency domains and is purported to be implicated in the pathogenesis of dementia and HRV decline [5,13,42].…”