(607.5) Application of Physiological Autonomic Activity Tracking GUI and Computational Algorithms for Measuring Persistent Vagal Nerve Dysfunction After Recovery from SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Poster Board Number: E530

Damen Wilson (Purdue University), Thomas Nowak (Indiana University Health), Anita Gupta (Indiana University Health), Michael McKinnon (BioCircuit Technologies), Isaac Clements (BioCircuit Technologies), Thomas Everett (Indiana University School of Medicine), Terry Powley (Purdue University), Matthew Ward (Purdue University)

Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) is now recognized as a constellation of symptoms such as postural hypotension, anxiety, and “brain fog” in addition to autonomic nervous system dysfunction such as tachycardia and labile hypertension. Better quantification of these conditions, specifically, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, is desired for future diagnostics, treatment modalities, and gaining a further understanding of PASC. This research has led to application of a novel autonomic activity tracking algorithm and GUI suite from previous work, see Figure 1, to study the physiological autonomic activity in six patients who had recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection a mean of six months prior but were still experiencing symptoms. By measuring skin sympathetic nervous activity (SKNA), heart rate variability, and the cutaneous electrogastrogram (EGG), all before and after a water meal challenge, the data was fed into a custom analysis pipeline, shown in Figure 1. Each of the PASC patients were compared to a mean response of 34 healthy controls, each undergoing a 20-minute baseline recording and another 20-minute recording after ingestion of an 8 oz water test meal. All six patients showed significantly abnormal heart rate variability on frequency domain analysis in predominantly the low frequency (LF) and very low frequency (VLF) bands, and less so in the high frequency (HF) band, suggesting sympathetic nerve dysfunction. Three patients showed a significant decrease in SKNA while two showed a significant increase. All patients showed an abnormal cutaneous EGG. As shown in Figure 2, the temporal responses of aSKNA, VLF, LF, HF, and EGG for the PASC patients revealed that on average they were statistically different (plt;0.05) from the healthy controls’ responses respectively during 98.4%, 78.4%, 86.76%, 47.9%, and 86.1% of the 40-minute time period in testing, 20 minutes of baseline and 20 minutes after ingestion. In conclusion, we are looking at the sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric nervous systems synced temporally for applications with classification and further stratification of PASC based on the temporal dynamics of their autonomic nervous system mediated coordination from digestion. This shows that SARS-CoV02 infection appears to have a significant effect on sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous system function and may be responsible for the disturbances noted in PASC. This work provides the framework and example of use for further applications in autonomic disorder physiological response exploration and furthermore can be expanded to other areas of neuromodulation.

This research was supported by the Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health under Award Number OT2OD028183 and Award Number OT2OD023847, in addition to the SPARC Program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.





Flowchart of the signal processing pipelines used on data collected from 34 healthy human subjects and 6 subjects who had PASC. [EKG: Electrocardiogram; EGG: Electrogastrogram; HRV: Heart Rate Variability; SKNA: Skin Sympathetic Nerve Activity]. Source: Wilson, Damen, et al. “Development of GUI and Computational Algorithms for Real‐Time Physiological Autonomic Activity Tracking.” FASEB, 14 May 2021, https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fasebj.2021.35.S1.03526.; (A): Heartrate variability, (B): Cutaneous electrogastrogram peak power*frequency, and mean skin sympathetic nerve activity of the 34 control subjects and six post-Covid patients shown. One patient was excluded from the SKNA analysis due to an implanted spinal stimulator interfering with the analysis. The shaded area represents the mean normal values and their 95% confidence intervals. Values outside the shading are significantly different from the corresponding control (p < 0.05).