Two-Tiered Response of Cardiorespiratory-Cerebrovascular Network to Orthostatic Challenge

Peter Mukli; Zoltan Nagy; Frigyes Samuel Racz; Istvan Portoro; Andras Hartmann; Orestis Stylianou; Robert Debreczeni; Daniel Bereczki; Andras Eke

doi:10.3389/fphys.2021.622569

Two-Tiered Response of Cardiorespiratory-Cerebrovascular Network to Orthostatic Challenge

Front Physiol. 2021 Mar 2:12:622569. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2021.622569. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Peter Mukli^{1

2

3}, Zoltan Nagy³, Frigyes Samuel Racz¹, Istvan Portoro³, Andras Hartmann^{3

4}, Orestis Stylianou^{1

3}, Robert Debreczeni⁵, Daniel Bereczki⁵, Andras Eke^{1

3

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physiology, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.
² Vascular Cognitive Impairment and Neurodegeneration Program, Oklahoma Center for Geroscience and Healthy Brain Aging, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, United States.
³ Institute of Translational Medicine, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.
⁴ Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE), Stockholm, Sweden.
⁵ Department of Neurology, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.
⁶ Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, United States.

Abstract

Dynamic interdependencies within and between physiological systems and subsystems are key for homeostatic mechanisms to establish an optimal state of the organism. These interactions mediate regulatory responses elicited by various perturbations, such as the high-pressure baroreflex and cerebral autoregulation, alleviating the impact of orthostatic stress on cerebral hemodynamics and oxygenation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the responsiveness of the cardiorespiratory-cerebrovascular networks by capturing linear and nonlinear interdependencies to postural changes. Ten young healthy adults participated in our study. Non-invasive measurements of arterial blood pressure (from that cardiac cycle durations were derived), breath-to-breath interval, cerebral blood flow velocity (BFV, recorded by transcranial Doppler sonography), and cerebral hemodynamics (HbT, total hemoglobin content monitored by near-infrared spectroscopy) were performed for 30-min in resting state, followed by a 1-min stand-up and a 1-min sit-down period. During preprocessing, noise was filtered and the contribution of arterial blood pressure was regressed from BFV and HbT signals. Cardiorespiratory-cerebrovascular networks were reconstructed by computing pair-wise Pearson-correlation or mutual information between the resampled signals to capture their linear and/or nonlinear interdependencies, respectively. The interdependencies between cardiac, respiratory, and cerebrovascular dynamics showed a marked weakening after standing up persisting throughout the sit-down period, which could mainly be attributed to strikingly attenuated nonlinear coupling. To summarize, we found that postural changes induced topological changes in the cardiorespiratory-cerebrovascular network. The dissolution of nonlinear networks suggests that the complexity of key homeostatic mechanisms maintaining cerebral hemodynamics and oxygenation is indeed sensitive to physiological perturbations such as orthostatic stress.

Keywords: cardiorespiratory; cerebrovascular; near-infrared spectroscopy; network physiology; nonlinear; orthostatic stress; surrogate testing; transcranial Doppler.