Analysis of heart-rate-based control of arterial blood
pressure.
Rose, William C., and James S. Schwaber.
Neural Computation Program, DuPont Central Research &
Development, Wilmington, DE 19880-0328
APStracts 3:0045H, 1996.
Vagal control of the heart is the most rapidly responding limb of the
arterial baroreflex. We created a mathematical model of the left
heart and vascular system to evaluate the ability of heart rate to
influence blood pressure. The results show that arterial pressure
depends nonlinearly on rate and that changes in rate are of limited
effectiveness, particularly when rate is increased above the basal
level. A 10% change in heart rate from rest causes a change of only
2.4% in arterial pressure, due to the reciprocal relation between
heart rate and stroke volume: at higher rates, insufficient filling
time causes stroke volume to fall. These findings agree well with
published experimental data, and challenge the idea that heart rate
changes alone can strongly and rapidly affect arterial pressure.
Possible implications are that vagally mediated alterations in
inotropic and dromotropic state, which are not included in this
model, play important roles in the fast reflex control of blood
pressure, or that the vagal limb of the baroreflex is of rather
limited effectiveness.
Received 17 July 1995; accepted in final form 11 January 1996.
APS Manuscript Number H660-5.
Article publication pending Am. J. Physiol. (Heart Circ. Physiology).
ISSN 1080-4757 Copyright 1996 The American Physiological Society.
Published in APStracts on 29 January 96