Metrics of high cofluctuation and entropy to describe control of cardiac function in the stellate ganglion

• Published in: eLife Vol. 11
• Main Authors: Gurel, Nil Z, Sudarshan, Koustubh B, Hadaya, Joseph, Karavos, Alex, Temma, Taro, Hori, Yuichi, Armour, J Andrew, Kember, Guy, Ajijola, Olujimi A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 25.11.2022; eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
• Subjects: Animals; Autonomic nervous system; Benchmarking; cardiac control; Cardiac function; cardiac nervous system; Computational and Systems Biology; Confidence intervals; Congestive heart failure; Entropy; Ganglia; Heart; Heart Failure; Information processing; Interneurons; Neural networks; neural population dynamics; neural recordings; Physics of Living Systems; Signal processing; Standard deviation; Stellate ganglion; Stellate Ganglion - physiology; Stellate Ganglion - surgery; sudden cardiac death; Swine; Time series; cardiac nervous system; computational biology; systems biology; stellate ganglion; neural population dynamics; neural recordings; sudden cardiac death; physics of living systems; cardiac control
• ISSN: 2050-084X; 2050-084X
• DOI: 10.7554/eLife.78520

Stellate ganglia within the intrathoracic cardiac control system receive and integrate central, peripheral, and cardiopulmonary information to produce postganglionic cardiac sympathetic inputs. Pathological anatomical and structural remodeling occurs within the neurons of the stellate ganglion (SG) in the setting of heart failure (HF). A large proportion of SG neurons function as interneurons whose networking capabilities are largely unknown. Current therapies are limited to targeting sympathetic activity at the cardiac level or surgical interventions such as stellectomy, to treat HF. Future therapies that target the SG will require understanding of their networking capabilities to modify any pathological remodeling. We observe SG networking by examining cofluctuation and specificity of SG networked activity to cardiac cycle phases. We investigate network processing of cardiopulmonary transduction by SG neuronal populations in porcine with chronic pacing-induced HF and control subjects during extended in-vivo extracellular microelectrode recordings. We find that information processing and cardiac control in chronic HF by the SG, relative to controls, exhibits: (i) more frequent, short-lived, high magnitude cofluctuations, (ii) greater variation in neural specificity to cardiac cycles, and (iii) neural network activity and cardiac control linkage that depends on disease state and cofluctuation magnitude.