Heart rate variability and severe brain damage: preliminary data

Severe brain damage may cause alterations of cardiovascular function: heart rate, particularly, require the integrity of the vagal, sympathetic and central nervous systems. We studied brain-heart functional relation and neurovegetative modulation by spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV). This technique allows separate evaluation of the sympathetic and vagal components of heart rate modulation. In order to correlate changes in HRV with brain damage, we performed 45 recordings in 6 patients (5/1 M/F) by means of autoregressive analysis (AAR). All patients were admitted to the ICU for severe brain damage (anoxic, traumatic or vascular). In 4 patients clinical outcome was brain death, in 2 permanent vegetative status. Two different patterns were found: one in patients with brain death, the other in patients with vegetative status. The small number of patients does not allow definitive conclusions from collected data, but that application of spectral analysis of HRV seems to be a useful monitoring of brain damage subjects.