Cardiovascular Changes Associated With Electroconvulsive Shock in Monkeys

IN A RECENT paper¹we reported the results of a series of experiments on dogs in which we measured directly the changes in carotid blood flow, arterial pressure, and cardiac rate associated with electroconvulsive shock. This method of measuring blood flow, in which we used an electromagnetic blood-flow meter,²is not applicable to the human subject, since it requires the cannulation of the carotid artery. In the anatomy of the dog, there is a vascular network, the rete mirabile, that provides connections between the intracranial and the extracranial blood vessels.³Since this vascular system is not present in man, it was desirable that the results obtained on dogs be verified by similar experiments performed on animals having a closer anatomical relationship to man. For this purpose, the rhesus macaque was the animal of choice in the present study. It was reasoned that if a pattern of cardiovascular