Role of Arterial Pressure Changes on the Time-Lagged Baroreflex Response

Physiological dynamics result from the control exerted by interconnected mechanisms including causal interactions occurring at various latencies. In this work, the Partial Information Decomposition framework is exploited to investigate the causal influence of systolic arterial pressure (SAP) lagged dynamics on heart rate (HR) variations in 61 young healthy subjects undergoing the orthostatic challenge. Our results highlight how the baroreflex dynamics are mainly characterized by a fast response of the cardiac activity to arterial pressure changes and how internal SAP dynamics affect this causal interaction.