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REVIEW article

Front. Netw. Physiol.
Sec. Networks in the Cardiovascular System
Volume 4 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnetp.2024.1315316
This article is part of the Research Topic Brain-Heart Interaction: Recent Insights in Methods View all 4 articles

The contribution of Granger causality analysis to our understanding of cardiovascular homeostasis: From cardiovascular and respiratory interactions to central autonomic network control

Provisionally accepted
Vincent Pichot Vincent Pichot 1*Christophe Corbier Christophe Corbier 2Florian Chouchou Florian Chouchou 3
  • 1 Saint-Etienne Jean Monnet University, CHU Saint-Etienne, Department of Clinical and Exercise Physiology, INSERM, SAINBIOSE U1059, Saint-Etienne, France
  • 2 Saint-Etienne Jean Monnet University, Roanne Technology University Institute, LASPI (EA3059), Roanne, France
  • 3 University of La Réunion, UFRSHE, IRISSE Laboratory (EA4075), Le Tampon, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Homeostatic regulation plays a fundamental role in maintenance of multicellular life. At different scales and in different biological systems, this principle allows a better understanding of biological organization. Consequently, a growing interest in studying cause-effect relations between physiological systems has emerged, such as in the fields of cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory regulations. For this, mathematical approaches such as Granger causality (GC) were applied to the field of cardiovascular physiology in the last 20 years, overcoming the limitations of previous approaches and offering new perspectives in understanding cardiac, vascular and respiratory homeostatic interactions. In clinical practice, continuous recording of clinical data of hospitalized patients or by telemetry has opened new applicability for these approaches with potential early diagnostic and prognostic information. In this review, we describe a theoretical background of approaches based on linear GC in time and frequency domains applied to detect couplings between time series of RR intervals, blood pressure and respiration. Interestingly, these tools help in understanding the contribution of homeostatic negative feedback and the anticipatory feedforward mechanisms in homeostatic cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory controls. We also describe experimental and clinical results based on these mathematical tools, consolidating previous experimental and clinical evidence on the coupling in cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory studies. Finally, we propose perspectives allowing to complete the understanding of these interactions between cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory systems, as well as the interplay between brain and cardiac, and vascular and respiratory systems, offering a high integrative view of cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory homeostatic regulation.

    Keywords: Homeostasis, Cardiac, Blood Pressure, Respiratory, Granger causality

    Received: 10 Oct 2023; Accepted: 18 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pichot, Corbier and Chouchou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Vincent Pichot, Saint-Etienne Jean Monnet University, CHU Saint-Etienne, Department of Clinical and Exercise Physiology, INSERM, SAINBIOSE U1059, Saint-Etienne, France

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.