Lack of habituation of the pattern of cardiovascular response evoked by sound in subjects with primary Raynaud’s disease

Abstract

1. The vasospasm of primary Raynaud's disease can be triggered by acute emotional stress. We have studied the pattern of cardiovascular response evoked by acute emotional stress, a sound stimulus of 90 dB, 2 kHz for 30 s, in eight subjects with primary Raynaud's disease and in eight age- and sex-matched controls, the sound being repeated five times on each of days 1, 3 and 5. 2. In controls, the first sound evoked the pattern of the alerting response that is characteristic of acute emotional stress: a rise in arterial pressure and heart rate, a decrease in vascular conductance in the cutaneous circulation of the digit, assessed by laser Doppler recording of erythrocyte (red cell) flux in the digit divided by arterial pressure, and an increase in forearm muscle vascular conductance, assessed from forearm blood flow recorded by venous occlusion plethysmography divided by arterial pressure. 3. In the subjects with primary Raynaud's disease, baselines of arterial pressure, digital cutaneous vascular conductance and forearm vascular conductance were not significantly different from those of the controls and they too showed the alerting response to the first sound, the magnitudes of the changes being comparable to those of the controls. 4. In both the controls and subjects with primary Raynaud's disease, the evoked responses were consistent on repetition of the sound on day 1. In contrast, judging from the means of the changes evoked on each day, the controls showed habituation of the individual components of the alerting response over days 1, 3 and 5, whereas the subjects with primary Raynaud's disease showed no habituation of either the forearm muscle vasodilatation or the digital vasoconstriction. Conversely, the decrease in digital cutaneous vascular conductance evoked by a single deep breath was fully reproducible in both controls and subjects with primary Raynaud's disease when tested at the beginning and end of each experimental day. 5. These results allow the novel conclusion that subjects with primary Raynaud's disease have an abnormality of the central neural modulation of the brain stem areas that integrate the cardiovascular components of the alerting response to acute emotional stress, such that habituation of the vasodilator and vasoconstrictor components of the response on repetition of the stimulus is impaired. We propose that such persistence of vasoconstrictor responses to stressful stimuli predisposes to vasospasm, particularly if neurally mediated vasoconstriction is reinforced by locally released vasoconstrictor factors.