Our paper on the effect of glucose on cardiac reactivity to slow paced breathing has been published open access in Scientific Reports!
In this experiment, healthy fasted adults drank one of four different drinks (sweet & caloric, sweet, caloric or water) before completing the D2 sustained attention test and a slow-paced breathing exercise. We obtained an ECG and ICG and analysed heart rate variability (indexing parasympathetic cardiac activity) and pre-ejection period (indexing sympathetic cardiac activity). We observed that glucose increased sympathetic cardiac activity. Despite this, slow-paced breathing increased parasympathetic cardiac activity. This shows that both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system can be active at the same time (cf. autonomic space model) and that hyperglycemia does noes not modualte the response to slow-paced breathing in healthy adults.