Neurocardiology

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The new field of neurocardiology hypothesizes that the heart is not just a muscle which pumps blood throughout the body but is a sensory organ. The heart is now seen as an extensive nervous system with a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, sufficient to qualify it as a "heart-brain."

For example, recent studies in neurocardiology have found that:

(1) The anatomical organization and function of the cardiac nervous system is a complex hierarchy of nested feedback control loops;

(2) Interactions occurring among multiple populations of heart neurons maintain cardiovascular stability and maximize cardiac efficiency;

(3) The heart as a complex, self-organized system maintains a continuous two-way dialogue with the brain and the rest of the body.

[edit] External links

B. H. Natelson, Neurocardiology. An interdisciplinary area for the 80s in Archives of Neurology Vol. 42 No. 2, February 1985, accessed at AMA Archives of Neurology[1] Feb 7, 2007