Why the study?
Heart rate variability is related to autonomic nervous system changes linked to stress and pain, but whether it can assess cancer pain in peritoneal metastases was unknown.
Can heart rate variability (HRV) be used to assess cancer pain in mice with peritoneal metastases?
Can heart rate variability (HRV) be used to assess cancer pain in mice with peritoneal metastases?
Heart rate variability parameters may serve as a useful surrogate marker for assessing cancer pain and autonomic nervous system activity in preclinical models.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Should not yet change clinical cancer pain assessment; leaves open HRV as a translational objective marker in metastatic models.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is closely related to changes in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) associated with stress and pain. In this study, we investigated whether HRV could be used to assess cancer pain in mice with peritoneal metastases. At 12 days after cancer induction, positive indicators of pain such as physiological characteristics, appearance, posture, and activity were observed, and time- and frequency-domain HRV parameters such as mean R-R interval, square root of the mean squared differences of successive R-R intervals, and percentage of successive R-R interval differences greater than 5 ms, low frequency (LF), high frequency (HF), and ratio of LF and HF power, were found to be significantly decreased. These parameters returned to normal after analgesic administration. Our results indicate that overall ANS activity was decreased by cancer pain and that HRV could be a useful tool for assessing pain.
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Kim et al. (2022) studied this question.
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