Andy Schumann

Universitätsklinikum Jena

Objective: Individuals diagnosed with anorexia nervosa (AN) often report seeing themselves as overweight. While body size estimation tasks suggest that such individuals overestimate their body size, these tasks have failed to establish whether this misestimation stems from visual misperception. Misestimation might, instead, be due to response bias...

Autonomic cardiac dysfunction is a common complication in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). Despite its high prevalence, physicians often overlook this clinical condition, and little research has been dedicated so far. To probe the functional role of the neurocircuitry underpinning the poorly understood autonomic cardiac dysfunction, we examined...

Introduction Aging is accompanied by physiological changes in cardiovascular regulation that can be evaluated using a variety of metrics. In this study, we employ machine learning on autonomic cardiovascular indices in order to estimate participants’ age. Methods We analyzed a database including resting state electrocardiogram and continuous blood...

Background Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by low body weight, disturbed eating, body image disturbance, anxiety, and interoceptive dysfunction. However, the neural processes underlying these dysfunctions in AN are unclear. This investigation combined an interoceptive pharmacological probe, the peripheral beta-adrenergic agonist isoprotereno...

Background: Cardiac autonomic dysfunction (CADF) is a major contributor to increased cardiac mortality in schizophrenia patients. The aberrant function of voltage-gated ion channels, which are widely distributed in the brain and heart, may link schizophrenia and CADF. In search of channel-encoding genes that are associated with both CADF and schiz...

Physical exercise causes marked adjustments in brain function and the cardiovascular system. Brain regions of the so-called central autonomic network (CAN) are likely to show exercise-related alterations due to their involvement in cardiac control, yet exercise-induced CAN changes remain unclear. Here we investigate the effects of intensive exercis...

Objective Recent studies suggest that lower resting heart rate variability (HRV) is associated with elevated vulnerability to depressive rumination. In this study, we tested whether increases in HRV after HRV-biofeedback training are accompanied by reductions in rumination levels. Materials and methods Sixteen patients suffering from depression co...

Physical exercise causes marked adjustments in brain function and the cardiovascular system. Brain regions of the so-called central autonomic network (CAN) are likely to show exercise-related alterations due to their involvement in cardiac control, yet exercise-induced CAN changes remain unclear. Here we investigate the effects of intensive exercis...

Autonomic regulation of blood pressure and cardiac rhythm progressively declines with increasing age. Impaired cardiovascular control promotes a variety of age-related cardio-vascular conditions. This study aims to provide a database of high-resolution biological signals to describe the effect of healthy aging on cardiovascular regulation. Electroc...

Objectives: Decreased vagal modulation, which has consistently been observed in schizophrenic patients, might contribute to increased cardiac mortality in schizophrenia. Previously, associations between CHRM2 (Cholinergic Receptor Muscarinic 2) and cardiac autonomic features have been reported. Here, we tested for possible associations between the...

Heart rate variability (HRV) is regularly assessed in neuroimaging studies as an indicator of autonomic, emotional or cognitive processes. In this study, we investigated the influence of a loud and cramped environment during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on resting HRV measures. We compared recordings during functional MRI sessions with recordin...

Aging is accompanied by changes in the cardiovascular physiology that promote the development of age-related diseases. This paper presents a modern approach to quantify the physiological effects of age on the cardiovascular system by applying modern machine learning techniques to several indicators of autonomic cardiovascular function. In 885 healt...

Introduction Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric illness with alarming mortality rates. Nevertheless, despite former and recent research results, the etiology of AN is still poorly understood. Of particular interest is that, despite exaggerated response control and increased perfectionism scores, patients with AN seem not to perform bette...

Background Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback has a beneficial impact on perceived stress and emotion regulation. However, its impact on brain function is still unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect of an 8-week HRV-biofeedback intervention on functional brain connectivity in healthy subjects.MethodsHRV biofeedback was ca...

Evidence suggests functional brain networks, especially the executive control network (ECN) and default mode network (DMN), to be abnormal in schizophrenia. Dysfunctions within the locus coeruleus (LC)‐noradrenaline (NE) system, which is supposed to be pivotal to modulate neuronal network activation during executive control (e.g., working memory fu...

Structural brain abnormalities are a consistent finding in anorexia nervosa (AN) and proposed as a state biomarker of the disorder. Yet little is known about how regional structural changes affect intrinsic resting-state functional brain connectivity (rsFC). Using a cross-sectional, multimodal imaging approach, we investigated the association betwe...

Background There is growing evidence for a shared genetic basis between schizophrenia risk and cardiovascular disease. Reduced efferent vagal activity, indexed by reduced heart rate variability (HRV), has been consistently described in patients with schizophrenia and may potentially contribute to the increased cardiovascular risk in these patients....

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies showed that blood oxygenation level‐dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations in the default mode network (DMN) are functionally tightly connected to those in monoaminergic nuclei, producing dopamine (DA), and serotonin (5‐HT) transmitters, in the midbrain/brainstem. We combined accelerated fMR...

Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morphology across the lifespan provides important insights into neurovisceral mechanisms underlying health and disease. Resting state ANS activity, indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV] has been associated with brain morphology, partic...

Background Heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback has beneficial influence on perceived stress and emotion regulation. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect of an HRV-biofeedback intervention on resting functional brain connectivity in healthy subjects. Methods The 8-week HRV biofeedback training was carried out in five sessions per w...

Quantification of directed (nonlinear) brain-heart interactions has turned to be an emerging topic of research and is important for the better understanding of central autonomic processing during specific diseases such as schizophrenia. Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) was able to provide directed, frequency-selective and topographic views on existen...

Pupillary unrest is an established indicator of drowsiness or sleepiness. How sympathetic and parasympathetic activity contribute to pupillary unrest is not entirely unclear. In this study, we investigated 83 young healthy volunteers to assess the relationship of pupillary unrest to other markers of the autonomic nervous system. Sample entropy (SE)...

Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have an augmented risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Although a link between depression and autonomic dysfunction as well as reduced cardio-respiratory fitness (CRF) is well documented, the underlying cause is a matter of debate. Therefore, we studied the interplay between autonomic functio...

Previous research on central nervous serotonin (5-HT) function provided evidence for a substantial involvement of 5-HT in the regulation of brain circuitries associated with cognitive and affective processing. The underlying neural networks comprise core subcortical/cortical regions such as amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex, which are assumed t...

Background: A multitude of complex methods is available to quantify interactions in highly complex physiological systems. Brain-heart interactions play an important role to identify couplings between the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system during defined physiological states or specific diseases. Crucial point of those interact...

Mental depression is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, thus provisioning generic simple nonlinear mathematical models for normal and depressed cases using only heart rate (HR) or stroke volume (SV) as a single input to produce cardiac output (CO) as a single output instead of using both HR and SV as two inputs. The prop...

The reaction of pupil diameter and skin conductance are widely studied marker of the autonomic response to arousing stimuli. However, little is known about their relation at rest. In this study, we used bivariate phase-rectified signal averaging to investigate the relationship of skin conductance fluctuations (SCF) and pupillary fluctuations in 83...

A large body of scientific studies suggest a close relationship between increased vagal function and better cognitive performance. In the current study, we investigated the association between autonomic function and behavioral impulsivity. We hypothesized that heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback training increases HRV and enhances inhibitory c...

The peripheral autonomic nervous system (ANS) adjusts the heart rate (HR) to intrinsic and extrinsic demands. It is controlled by a group of functionally connected brain regions assembling the so-called central autonomic network (CAN). More specifically, forebrain cortical regions, limbic and brainstem structures within the CAN have been identified...

Brainstem and midbrain nuclei are closely linked to cognitive performance and autonomic function. To advance the localization in this area, precise functional imaging is fundamental. In this study, we used a sophisticated fMRI technique as well as physiological recordings to investigate the involvement of brainstem/midbrain nuclei in cognitive cont...

Brainstem and midbrain nuclei are closely linked to effective cognitive performance and autonomic function. In the present study, we aimed to investigate indices of successful and unsuccessful response inhibition paying particular attention to the interplay between locus coeruleus (LC), ventral tegmental area (VTA)/substantia nigra (SN) and, most i...

Appropriate analyses of directed complex interactions within the cardiovascular-respiratory system are of growing interest for a better understanding of physiological regulatory mechanisms in healthy subjects and diseased persons. There are various concepts to analyze such interactions. Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) provides the possibility to def...

Background A shortened life expectancy of about 15–20 years in patients with schizophrenia (SZ) is very well documented. Cardiovascular disease has been identified as one of the leading causes of premature death. Beyond the effects accounted for by lifestyle and antipsychotic medications, several lines of evidence indicate a shared underlying patho...

The elevated cardiovascular risk of patients with schizophrenia contributes to a reduced life expectancy of 15–20 years. This study investigated whether cardiac autonomic dysfunction (CADF) in schizophrenia is related to chronotropic incompetence, an established cardiovascular risk marker. We investigated thirty-two patients suffering from paranoid...

Impulsive behavior, difficulties in controlling anger and suicidal behavior are typical patterns of affective/behavioral dysregulation in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Previous functional MRI studies in the resting state condition demonstrated altered functional connectivity (FC) between the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) an...

The ability to predict when a person is about to fall asleep is an important challenge in recent biomedical research and has various possible applications. Sleepiness and fatigue are known to increase pupillary fluctuations and the occurrence of eye blinks. In this study, we evaluated the use of the pupil diameter to forecast sleep episodes of shor...

Estimating interactions between physiological systems is an important challenge in modern biomedical research. Here, we explore a new concept for quantifying information common in two time series by cross-compressibility. Cross-compression entropy (CCE) exploits the ZIP data compression algorithm extended to bivariate data analysis. First, time ser...

In life-threatening diseases and in several clinical interventions, monitoring of vital parameters is essential to guarantee the safety of patients. Besides monitoring the electrocardiogram (ECG), it is helpful to assess respiratory activity. If the respiration signal itself is not recorded, it can be extracted from the ECG (i.e. ECG derived respir...

Monitoring of cardiac and respiratory activity, is essential in several clinical interventions like bicycle ergometries. The respiration signal can be derived from the ECG if it is not recorded itself (ECG derived respiration, EDR). In this study, we tried to reconstruct breathing rates (BR) from stress test high resolution 12-channel-ECGs in nine...

Autonomic control of the heart rate was demonstrated to be complex and nonlinear. Respiratory sinus arrhythima plays a crucial role in heart rate vagal modulation. Here we present an approach of assessing nonlinear causal relationships in bivariate time series, called mutual compression entropy (MCE). We applied MCE to cardiorespiratory data of 29...

Evaluating individual aerobic exercise capacity is fundamental in sports and exercise medicine but associated with organizational and instrumental effort. Here, we extract an index related to common performance markers, the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds enabling the estimation of exercise capacity from a conventional sports watch supporting beat...

The arterial blood pressure (ABP) holds a lot of information about the cardiovascular system. To analyse the ABP signal, at first the pulse wave has to be detected correctly. Due to influences, e.g. of noise, an accurate beat detection is a challenging task. In this work, a novel real-time ABP detector based on higher-order statistics is presented....

Abstract Regular physical exercise leads increased vagal modulation of the cardiovascular system. A combination of peripheral and central processes has been proposed to underlie this adaptation. However, specific changes in the central autonomic network have not been described in human in more detail. We hypothesized that the anterior hippocampus k...

Regular physical exercise leads to increased vagal modulation of the cardiovascular system. A combination of peripheral and central processes has been proposed to underlie this adaptation. However, specific changes in the central autonomic network have not been described in human in more detail. We hypothesized that the anterior hippocampus known t...

The hippocampus (HPC) is functionally heterogeneous along the longitudinal anterior-posterior axis. In rodent models, gene expression maps define at least three discrete longitudinal subregions, which also differ in function, and in anatomical connectivity with the rest of the brain. In humans, equivalent HPC subregions are less well defined, resul...

For a variety of clinical applications like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) the monitoring of vital signs is a common standard in clinical daily routine. Besides the electrocardiogram (ECG), the respiratory activity is an important vital parameter and might reveal pathological changes. Thoracic movement and the resulting impedance change between E...

Respiratory and cardiovascular rhythms were discovered in the temporal fluctuations of pupil sizes. The mechanism is physiologically explainable but the potential clinical importance of pupillary unrest has not been studied extensively in the past. Here we analyzed the pupillograms of 29 healthy controls on different time scales and correlated the...

Interventional studies suggest that changes in physical fitness affect brain function and structure. We studied the influence of high intensity physical exercise on hippocampal volume and metabolism in 17 young healthy male adults during a 6-week exercise program compared with matched controls. We further aimed to relate these changes to hypothesiz...

The brainstem is of tremendous importance for our daily survival, and yet the functional relationships between various nuclei, their projection targets, and afferent regulatory areas remain poorly characterized. The main reason for this lies in the sub-optimal performance of standard neuroimaging methods in this area. In particular, fMRI signals ar...