Brain structural changes associated with aberrant functional responses to the Valsalva maneuver in heart failure.

ABSTRACT: Heart failure (HF) patients show inability to regulate autonomic functions in response to autonomic challenges. The autonomic deficits may stem from brain tissue injury in central autonomic regulatory areas, resulting from ischemic and hypoxic processes accompanying the condition. However, the direct evaluation of correlations between brain structural injury and functional timing and magnitude of neural signal patterns within affected areas, which may lead to impaired autonomic outflow, is unclear. In this study, we evaluate neural responses to the Valsalva maneuver with blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging in 29 HF patients and 35 control subjects and brain structural changes using diffusion tensor imaging-based mean diffusivity in a subsample of 19 HF and 24

SUBMITTER: Song X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6097241 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature