Heart Rate Variability, Cognitive Performance and Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults: Cross‐Sectional Results From the Einstein Aging Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Aims Although prior work has examined the relation of heart rate variability (HRV) to cognitive impairment, findings have been inconsistent. The association of cardiac vagal control with cognitive impairment remains unclear. Our goal was to examine the association of high frequency HRV (hf‐HRV) with mild cognitive impairment and global cognition in a community‐based sample of older adults. Methods 84 participants (mean age 78.1 SD 5.2 years) wore single lead ECG devices for 6‐9 days. HRV in the high (0.15–0.40 Hz, [HF‐HRV]) frequency band was derived using power spectral analyses. The cognitive battery included the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to assess global cognition, and two tests per domain for memory, executive, language, visuo‐spatial and attention. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) was defined using Jak‐Bondi criteria. Domain specific impairment was defined as scores > 1.0 SD below age, sex, education standardized norms on at least one test in a domain. Associations of HF‐HRV with cognition were examined using logistic and linear regression adjusted for demographics, diabetes, and hypertension. Results Participants were 82% female; 39% Non‐Hispanic White, 44% Non‐Hispanic Black, 25% had MCI. Within domains, impairment was present in 25% (memory), 28.6% (executive function), 21.4% (attention), 17.9% (language), and 27.4% (visuospatial). HF‐HRV was inversely associated with prevalent MCI (OR per 1 SD increase in ln HF‐HRV: 0.47, p = 0.02) and with memory impairment (OR per 1 SD increase in ln HF‐HRV: 0.52, p = 0.03). Higher HF‐HRV was associated with higher MoCA score (β for 1 SD increase in ln HF‐HRV = 0.65, p = 0.046). Conclusion Higher hf‐HRV, indicative of greater cardiac parasympathetic control is associated with lower odds of MCI, or memory impairment and with better global cognition after adjustment for cardiovascular risk factors. Future longitudinal studies are needed to confirm these associations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".