The interactions between the brain and heart during sleep are responsible for regulating autonomic function. While brain-heart coupling has been studied in healthy populations, the relationships between neural and cardiac activity across sleep stages in the presence of sleep disorders are not clear. This study examines the influence of brain-driven cardiac activity across sleep stages for individuals with sleep disorders. Overnight recordings of C3 and C4 electroencephalogram (EEG) channels and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from 146 individuals were preprocessed and analyzed in the frequency domain through a linear mixed-effect model. Our results show that parasympathetic activity is sensitive to changes in delta and beta powers during later stages of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, as both band powers exhibited strong negative effects on high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) power. These findings show that neural activity can drive vagal tone across sleep stages, suggesting that treatments on key EEG bands during NREM and REM stages may help restore regular cardiac behaviour.

翻译：睡眠期间大脑与心脏的相互作用负责调节自主神经功能。尽管脑心耦合已在健康人群中得到研究，但在存在睡眠障碍的情况下，神经活动与心脏活动跨睡眠阶段的关系尚不明确。本研究考察了睡眠障碍患者跨睡眠阶段的大脑驱动心脏活动的影响。通过对146名个体的C3和C4脑电图通道及心电图信号的整夜记录进行预处理，并采用线性混合效应模型在频域进行分析。我们的结果表明，副交感神经活动在非快速眼动睡眠后期对δ波和β波功率的变化敏感，因为这两个频段功率均对高频心率变异性功率表现出强烈的负向影响。这些发现表明，神经活动能够跨睡眠阶段驱动迷走神经张力，提示在非快速眼动和快速眼动睡眠阶段针对关键脑电图频段的干预可能有助于恢复规律的心脏行为。