Title Effects of Alzheimer\'s disease of varying severity on cardiac and autonomic function.
Author Geng, Duyan; Wang, Yan; Gao, Zeyu; Wang, Jiaxing; Liu, Xuanyu; Pang, Geng
Journal Braz J Med Biol Res Publication Year/Month 2022
PMID 35019033 PMCID PMC8851908
Affiliation + expend 1.State Key Laboratory of Reliability and Intelligence of Electrical Equipment, School of Electrical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China.

Alzheimer\'s disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in the elderly. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of AD on cardiac function and autonomic nervous function, and the feasibility of electrocardiogram (ECG) in monitoring the development of AD. APP/PS1 double transgenic mice were used in the Morris water maze (MWM) experiment to evaluate the changes of cognitive ability of AD mice, then the non-invasive ECG acquisition system was used and the changes of ECG intervals and heart rate variability (HRV) were analyzed. AD mice already had cognitive dysfunction at the age of 5 months, reaching the level of mild dementia, and the degree of dementia increased with the course of disease. There were no significant changes in ECG intervals in the AD group at each month. The mean square of successive RR interval differences, percentage of intervals >6 ms different from preceding interval, and normalized high frequency power component in the AD group were decreased and low-to-high frequency power ratio and normalized low frequency power component were increased. Combined with the results of the MWM, it was shown that the regulation mechanism of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves in mice was already imbalanced in early stage AD, which was manifested as the increase of excessive activity of sympathetic nerves and the inhibition of parasympathetic activities. Therefore, ECG-based analysis of HRV may become a means of daily monitoring of AD and provide an auxiliary basis for clinical diagnosis.

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