Uncovering Hemispheric Asymmetry and Directed Oscillatory Brain-Heart Interplay in Anxiety Processing: An fMRI Study.

Brain-heart interactions (BHI) are critical for generating and processing emotions, including anxiety. Understanding specific neural correlates would be instrumental for greater comprehension and potential therapeutic interventions of anxiety disorders. While prior work has implicated the pontine structure as a central processor in cardiac regulation in anxiety, the distributed nature of anxiety processing across the cortex remains elusive.

Scan-associated anxiety (scanxiety): the enigma of emotional breathing oscillations at 0.32 Hz (19 bpm).

MRI-related anxiety in healthy participants is often characterized by a dominant breathing frequency at around 0.32 Hz (19 breaths per minute, bpm) at the beginning but in a few cases also at the end of scanning. Breathing waves at 19 bpm are also observed in patients with anxiety independently of the scanned body part.

Analysis of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia and Directed Information Flow between Brain and Body Indicate Different Management Strategies of fMRI-Related Anxiety.

Background: Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) denotes decrease of cardiac beat-to-beat intervals (RRI) during inspiration and RRI increase during expiration, but an inverse pattern (termed negative RSA) was also found in healthy humans with elevated anxiety. It was detected using wave-by-wave analysis of cardiorespiratory rhythms and was considered to reflect a strategy of anxiety management involving the activation of a neural pacemaker. Results were consistent with slow breathing, but contained uncertainty at normal breathing rates (0.

Respiration-entrained brain oscillations in healthy fMRI participants with high anxiety.

Brain-body interactions can be studied by using directed coupling measurements of fMRI oscillations in the low (0.1-0.2 Hz) and high frequency bands (HF; 0.

Processing of fMRI-related anxiety and information flow between brain and body revealed a preponderance of oscillations at 0.15/0.16 Hz.

Slow oscillations of different center frequencies and their coupling play an important role in brain-body interactions. The crucial question analyzed by us is, whether the low frequency (LF) band (0.05-0.