Research Center E. Piaggio & Department of Information Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Pisa, 56126, Pisa, Italy.
Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, 35131, Padua, Italy.
Transl Psychiatry. 2021 Apr 14;11(1):221. doi: 10.1038/s41398-021-01336-4.
Subclinical depression (dysphoria) is a common condition that may increase the risk of major depression and leads to impaired quality of life and severe comorbid somatic diseases. Despite its prevalence, specific biological markers are unknown; consequently, the identification of dysphoria currently relies exclusively on subjective clinical scores and structured interviews. Based on recent neurocardiology studies that link brain and cardiovascular disorders, it was hypothesized that multi-system biomarkers of brain-body interplay may effectively characterize dysphoria. Thus, an ad hoc computational technique was developed to quantify the functional bidirectional brain-heart interplay. Accordingly, 32-channel electroencephalographic and heart rate variability series were obtained from 24 young dysphoric adults and 36 healthy controls. All participants were females of a similar age, and results were obtained during a 5-min resting state. The experimental results suggest that a specific feature of dysphoria is linked to an augmented functional central-autonomic control to the heart, which originates from central, frontopolar, and occipital oscillations and acts through cardiovascular sympathovagal activity. These results enable further development of a large set of novel biomarkers for mood disorders based on comprehensive brain-body measurements.
亚临床抑郁症（心境恶劣）是一种常见的病症，可能会增加患重度抑郁症的风险，并导致生活质量受损和严重的共患躯体疾病。尽管它很普遍，但目前还不知道其特定的生物学标志物；因此，心境恶劣的识别目前完全依赖于主观的临床评分和结构化访谈。基于最近将大脑和心血管疾病联系起来的神经心脏病学研究，人们假设大脑-身体相互作用的多系统生物标志物可以有效地描述心境恶劣。因此，开发了一种专门的计算技术来量化大脑-心脏双向功能相互作用。相应地，从 24 名年轻的心境恶劣的成年人和 36 名健康对照者中获得了 32 通道脑电图和心率变异性系列。所有参与者都是年龄相仿的女性，结果是在 5 分钟的静息状态下获得的。实验结果表明，心境恶劣的一个特定特征与增强的心脏的中枢自主神经控制功能有关，这种功能源自于中枢、额极和枕部的振荡，并通过心血管交感神经活动发挥作用。这些结果使我们能够基于全面的大脑-身体测量进一步开发出一系列用于情绪障碍的新型生物标志物。
