Associations between symptoms of depression and heart rate variability: An exploratory study.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with decreased heart rate variability (HRV), a predictor of cardiovascular morbidity by many, but not all studies. This inconsistency could be due to the association of HRV with specific depressive symptoms. Here, we investigated the association of HRV parameters with components of depressive symptoms from 120 MDD patients, at baseline of a published trial comparing the effect of sertraline to transcranial direct current stimulation.