Cardiac interaction between mother and infant: enhancement of heart rate variability

Ayami Suga,Hideki Ohira,Hiroki Ishikawa,Maki Uraguchi,Akiko Tange

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56204-5

Ayami Suga, Hideki Ohira + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56204-5

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Dec 1, 2019
Citations: 16	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Nagoya University, Unicharm (Japan)

Abstract

The vagal activity of infants is represented by heart rate variability (HRV) and associated with both growth and socioemotional development. The enhancement of an infant’s vagal tone activity might be beneficial for development. This study explored whether HRV in infants aged 3–8 months can be enhanced by influencing HRV in mothers (40 dyads). The power of the low frequency (LF) component of maternal HRV was facilitated using slow-paced breathing. We investigated whether the change in maternal HRV affected the LF component in infants held by their mothers. In older infants (N = 14, 6–8 months) the LF power showed an increase during maternal paced breathing, whereas a delayed increase occurred after termination of maternal paced breathing in younger infants (N = 16, 3–5 months). These results show that the effects of maternal cardiac activity on the infant’s HRV are age-dependent. This age-dependent reactivity of the infant’s HRV could be due to the development of the inner model in infants which regulates physiological functions, including cardiac activity. This finding might help develop efficient methods for enhancing vagal nerve activity in infants.

Highlights

The vagal activity of infants is represented by heart rate variability (HRV) and associated with both growth and socioemotional development
Considering the wide individual differences in the low frequency (LF), the high frequency (HF) components of HRV in mothers and infants and the transfer entropy (TE) between mother and infant heartbeats at each baseline, we conducted a 3-way repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA)
We mainly focused on the LF component of HRV to measure the effects of paced respiration on HRV12, we examined the HF power and LF/HF ratio of HRV

Summary

Introduction

The vagal activity of infants is represented by heart rate variability (HRV) and associated with both growth and socioemotional development. This age-dependent reactivity of the infant’s HRV could be due to the development of the inner model in infants which regulates physiological functions, including cardiac activity This finding might help develop efficient methods for enhancing vagal nerve activity in infants. During the period of rapid development of motor functions that enable crawling and walking, at [3,4,5,6,7,8] months old, the prominent development of the autonomic nerve supports such motor functions, reflected by an increase in infant HRV, which is parallelly observed[10,11] Considering this finding, the characteristics of cardiac interactions between mother and infant might change during such a period

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