title: Central- and autonomic nervous system coupling in schizophrenia.
abstract: The autonomic nervous system (ANS) dysfunction has been well described in schizophrenia (SZ), a severe mental disorder. Nevertheless, the coupling between the ANS and central brain activity has been not addressed until now in SZ. The interactions between the central nervous system (CNS) and ANS need to be considered as a feedback-feed-forward system that supports flexible and adaptive responses to specific demands. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, this study investigates central-autonomic couplings (CAC) studying heart rate, blood pressure and electroencephalogram in paranoid schizophrenic patients, comparing them with age-gender-matched healthy subjects (CO). The emphasis is to determine how these couplings are composed by the different regulatory aspects of the CNS-ANS. We found that CAC were bidirectional, and that the causal influence of central activity towards systolic blood pressure was more strongly pronounced than such causal influence towards heart rate in paranoid schizophrenic patients when compared with CO. In paranoid schizophrenic patients, the central activity was a much stronger variable, being more random and having fewer rhythmic oscillatory components. This study provides a more in-depth understanding of the interplay of neuronal and autonomic regulatory processes in SZ and most likely greater insights into the complex relationship between psychotic stages and autonomic activity.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Innovative Health Technologies, University of Applied Sciences, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Steffen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.affiliation: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Pain and Autonomics-Integrative Research, University Hospital, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bolz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Pain and Autonomics-Integrative Research, University Hospital, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Karl-Jürgen
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Bär
authors.affiliation: Institute of Innovative Health Technologies, University of Applied Sciences, Jena, Germany andreas.voss@fh-jena.de.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0236-0830
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Voss
mesh_terms: D012559:Schizophrenia
keywords: autonomous nervous system; causal coupling analyses; heart–brain interactions; joint symbolic dynamics; partial-directed coherence; schizophrenia