How does aging affect the central and peripheral arms of the sympathetic baroreflex arc?
Aging is associated with an enhanced central arc of the baroreflex, likely to compensate for impairments in the peripheral arc.
The present study demonstrates for the first time that the spontaneous baroreflex threshold gains of integrated muscle sympathetic nerve activity burst occurrence and medium-sized action potential clusters are greater in older compared with young adults. Since sympathetic transduction was blunted in older compared with young adults, we interpret the data to indicate that the central arc of the baroreflex is enhanced in older adults to compensate for impairments in the peripheral arc.
D’Souza et al. (Thu,) studied this question.