Characterization and Modeling of Muscle Sympathetic Nerve Spiking

Muscle sympathetic nerve activity is a primary source of cardiovascular control in humans. Traditional analyses smooth away the fine temporal structure of the sympathetic recordings, limiting our understanding of sympathetic activation mechanisms. We use multifiber spike trains extracted from standard microneurography voltage trace to characterize the sympathetic spiking at rest and during sympathoexcitation. Our analysis corroborates known features of sympathetic activity, such as bursting behavior, cardiac rhythmicity, and long conduction delays. It also elucidates new features such as large heartbeat-to-heartbeat variability of firing rates and precise pattern of spiking within cardiac cycles. We find that at low firing rates, spikes occur uniformly throughout the cardiac cycle, but at higher rates, they tend to cluster in bursts around a particular latency. This latency shortens and the clusters tighten as the firing rates grow. Sympathoexcitation increases firing rates and shifts the burst latency later. Negative rate/latency correlation and the sympathoexcitatory shift suggest that spike production of the individual fibers contributes significantly to the control of the sympathetic bursts strength. Access to fine scale temporal information, more physiologically accurate description of nerve activity, and new hypotheses about the nervous outflow control establishes sympathetic spiking as a valuable tool for the cardiovascular research.