Women with posttraumatic stress disorder have larger decreases in heart rate variability during stress tasks
Section snippets
The present study
The evidence reviewed here suggests that PTSD may be characterized by altered PNS functioning, but the findings are not entirely consistent. In particular, the relationship between PTSD and stress-induced changes in PNS activity is not well-established. Previous studies have often reported atypical HR and HF-HRV responses during long tasks, or no change during the task, or apparent ceiling or floor effects that attenuated changes from resting levels. We assert that PTSD is associated with
Methods
The following methods were approved by the local Institutional Review Board prior to study onset. All participants provided written informed consent prior to study participation.
Description of the sample
Descriptive statistics and group comparison statistics for the clinical and demographic characteristics of both groups are presented in Table 1. Groups did not differ in terms of age, race, marital status, weight, BMI, and current cardiovascular medication use. As can be seen in Table 1, control participants completed significantly more years of education and reported a significantly higher perceived SES than participants with PTSD. Participants with PTSD were significantly more likely to
Baseline parasympathetic functioning
Contrary to the first hypothesis, women with PTSD in the present study did not exhibit lower HF-HRV relative to age-matched controls during a resting baseline period. This result is consistent with two previous investigations (Sahar et al., 2001, Woodward et al., 2008), which found no differences in baseline HF-HR when comparing PTSD patients and trauma-exposed controls. However, the results of the present study differ from other investigations of resting HF-HRV among individuals with PTSD (
Conclusions
In summary, the present study found that participants with PTSD demonstrated larger reductions in HF-HRV during both speech tasks compared to control participants. This is interpreted to indicate a larger decline in parasympathetic cardiac control during stress, despite apparently similar levels of parasympathetic activity at rest. Such findings suggest that PTSD is related to the magnitude of decrease in parasympathetic cardiac control during stress in women. Possible implications of altered
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2023, International Journal of PsychophysiologyCitation Excerpt :Some studies have shown variation in ECG features in response to the presentation of emotional stimuli with negative valence from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), as an initial deceleration pattern of the beats per minute (Gantiva et al., 2019), followed by an acceleration of the heart rate (Wilson et al., 2020); and changes in the R-R intervals (Choi et al., 2017) when stimuli generate high activation. Some related studies have shown significant changes in frequency components of HRV with similar sample sizes per group (n = 20 (Keary et al., 2009), n = 18 (Rabellino et al., 2017)). Regarding the visual stimuli to elicit emotion, the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) consists on a set of images that can be presented to the subjects, each image having a score for the three emotional dimensions (valence, dominance and arousal).