Resting-state high-frequency heart rate variability is related to respiratory frequency in individuals with severe mental illness but not healthy controls

Heart rate variability (HRV) has become central to biobehavioral models of self-regulation and interpersonal interaction. While research on healthy populations suggests changes in respiratory frequency do not affect short-term HRV, thus negating the need to include respiratory frequency as a HRV covariate, the nature of the relationship between these two variables in psychiatric illness is poorly understood. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the association between HRV and respiratory frequency in a sample of individuals with severe psychiatric illness (n = 55) and a healthy control comparison group (n = 149). While there was no significant correlation between HF-HRV and respiration in the control group, we observed a significant negative correlation in the psychiatric illness group, with a 94.1% probability that these two relationships are different. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence suggesting that HF-HRV is related to respiratory frequency in severe mental illness, but not in healthy controls, suggesting that HRV research in this population may need to account for respiratory frequency. Future work is required to better understand the complex relationship between respiration and HRV in other clinical samples with psychiatric diseases.