The relationship between Gulf War Illness symptom severity and heart rate variability: A pilot study.

Autor: Jaquess KJ; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America; Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States of America; Department of Psychology, Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, United States of America. Electronic address: jaquess@juniata.edu., Allen N; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America., Chun TJ; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America., Crock L; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America., Zajdel AA; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America., Reinhard MJ; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America; Department of Psychiatry, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, United States of America., Costanzo ME; War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Department of Veterans Affairs Washington, DC, United States of America.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Life sciences [Life Sci] 2021 Sep 01; Vol. 280, pp. 119663. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Jun 02.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lfs.2021.119663
Abstrakt: Introduction: Gulf War Illness (GWI) is a chronic multisymptom illness affecting 250,000+ veterans of the '90-'91 Gulf War which remains under-explored in terms of its physiological characteristics. We investigated whether subjective GWI symptom severity scores were related to objective measures of autonomic nervous system activity.
Methods: We estimated activity in the two major branches of the autonomic nervous system (the parasympathetic nervous system [PNS] and the sympathetic nervous system [SNS]) via metrics of heart rate variability in a sample of Veterans who met established criteria for GWI with varying degrees of self-reported symptom severity. We hypothesized that subjective symptom severity scores would be inversely related to PNS activity and positively related to SNS activity.
Results: Significant negative relationships were observed between the root mean square of successive differences of beat-to-beat intervals (a measure of PNS activity) and symptom severity, both overall and across specific GWI symptom categories (sp. fatigue [r = -0.574], gastrointestinal [r = -0.544]). Furthermore, significant positive relationships were observed between the cardiac sympathetic index and symptom severity, both overall and across specific symptom categories (sp. cognitive [r = 0.721], fatigue [r = 0.560], gastrointestinal [r = 0.694], skin [r = 0.686]).
Conclusions: Metrics of PNS activation revealed a negative relationship with self-reported symptom severity, while metrics of SNS activation revealed a positive relationship. The present results improve our understanding of the physiology of GWI and provide a new window from which to consider this medically unexplained illness.
(Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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