Julia Shanks, Mridula Pachen, Joshua W.H. Chang, Bindu George and Rohit Ramchandra recently published a paper entitled, ‘Cardiac Vagal Nerve Activity Increases During Exercise to Enhance Coronary Blood Flow’.
During exercise, there is an increase in how fast the heart beats and the force of contraction of the heart. Heart function is modulated by autonomic nerves that travel from the brain to the heart. This paper highlights how increased parasympathetic nerve activity is vital to maintaining heart function during exercise, challenging current assumptions around the neural control of the heart during exercise. The authors used technically demanding direct recordings of this nerve in a pre-clinical exercising animal model, showing that recordings from this nerve can be made during exercise for the first time. Removal of this nerve reduces blood flow to the heart during exercise and leads to impairments in exercise tolerance. This finding hold clues to better understanding and treating exercise intolerance in cardiovascular disease.
This research was published in Circulation Research, one of the premier cardiology journals with an impact factor of over 20.
You can read the paper here