A new computational model of the pupillary light reflex can successfully extract and differentiate parasympathetic and sympathetic autonomic modulations, revealing sex differences in autonomic activity.
May enable noninvasive autonomic sex-difference assessment via PLR; leaves open clinical validation before practice change.
A pupillary light reflex (PLR) model was proposed in this paper by considering the iris muscle mechanical properties and modulation inputs from both parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. The model can describe very well the experimental PLR responses induced by a short light flash of various intensities. In addition, an inverse method was developed to fit numerically this model to experimental PLR data. The model was tested in experimental human PLR data to extract separately the parasympathetic and sympathetic modulations during PLR. The results indicated a higher parasympathetic and a lower sympathetic activity in females than in males, which was consistent with previous findings in cardiovascular studies. This new model may help improve our understanding of the PLR process and could be applied to analyze autonomic nervous interaction during pupillary responses.
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Fan et al. (2010) studied this question.
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