Resting-state high-frequency heart rate variability is related to respiratory frequency in individuals with severe mental illness but not healthy controls

Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) has become central to biobehavioral models of self-regulation and interpersonal interaction. While research on healthy populations suggests changes in respiratory frequency do not affect short-term HRV, thus negating the need to include respiratory frequency as a HRV covariate, the nature of the relationship between these two variables in psychiatric illness is poorly understood. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the association between HRV and respiratory frequency in a sample of individuals with severe psychiatric illness (n = 55) and a healthy control comparison group (n = 149). While there was no significant correlation between HF-HRV and respiration in the control group, we observed a significant negative correlation in the psychiatric illness group, with a 94.1% probability that these two relationships are different. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence suggesting that HF-HRV is related to respiratory frequency in severe mental illness, but not in healthy controls, suggesting that HRV research in this population may need to account for respiratory frequency. Future work is required to better understand the complex relationship between respiration and HRV in other clinical samples with psychiatric diseases.

Positive affect and parasympathetic activity: Evidence for a quadratic relationship between feeling safe and content and heart rate variability

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Association between habitual use of coping strategies and posttraumatic stress symptoms in a non-clinical sample of college students: A Bayesian approach

“…As mentioned before, the Bayesian approach does not rely on p values (that are dependent on sample size) and uses sampling algorithms (MCMC), making it more robust to small samples and outliers [65][66]. Finally, the adoption of both, frequentist and Bayesian, methods of statistical inference provide us more information to draw better conclusions about the data [39].…”

“…Our secondary goal was to compare two statistical approaches: the Frequentist and Bayesian analyses. This is important because one current issue in our scientific community is the replication of findings due to low power and the use of statistical methods that are not adequate for the analyses [38][39].…”

The control mechanisms of heart rate dynamics in a new heart rate nonlinear time series model

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