ArticleNeuroImage. Clinical2019
Increased heartbeat-evoked potential during REM sleep in nightmare disorder.
Article in NeuroImage. Clinical, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Heartbeat-Evoked Responses in M/EEG: A Systematic Review of Methods With Suggestions for Analysis and Reporting.Psychophysiology · 2026Pooled it
- Bad dream, nightmares and psychopathology: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Prisoners of the Body: The Link Between Interoception and Sleep Paralysis.Journal of sleep research · 2026Article
- Heartbeat-evoked potentials reveal interoceptive dysfunction in clinical disorders: Experimental frameworks and promising applications.Psychological medicine · 2026Review
- Nightmare disorder shows reduced slow oscillation-dominant spindle coupling in NREM sleep.Npj biological timing and sleep · 2026Article
- Polysomnographic Sleep in Idiopathic Nightmares: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Nature and science of sleep · 2026Article
- Obstructive sleep apnea increases heartbeat-evoked potentials and reorganizes Granger-causal coupling between cortical interoception and autonomic variability during wakefulness.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Characterizing the Heartbeat-Evoked Potential: A Two-Component Model of Cardiac Signal Processing?Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The Future of Parasomnias.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- Neural and Cardiac Contributions to Perceptual Suppression During Cycling.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Heartbeat-related activity in the anterior thalamus differs between phasic and tonic REM sleep.The Journal of physiology · 2025Article
- Validating genuine changes in heartbeat-evoked potentials using pseudotrials and surrogate procedures.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring the Link Between Interoception and Symptom Severity in Premature Ventricular Contractions.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
- Cardio-audio synchronization elicits neural and cardiac surprise responses in human wakefulness and sleep.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Enhanced external counterpulsation modulates the heartbeat evoked potential.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Modeling brain-heart interactions from Poincaré plot-derived measures of sympathetic-vagal activity.MethodsX · 2023Article
- Cardiac sympathetic-vagal activity initiates a functional brain-body response to emotional arousal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Nightmare content during the COVID-19 pandemic: Influence of COVID-related stress and sleep disruption in the United States.Journal of sleep research · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nightmares are characterized by the experience of strong negative emotions occurring mainly during REM sleep. Some people suffer from nightmare disorder, which is defined by the repeated occurrence of nightmares and by significant distress in wakefulness. Yet, whether frequent nightmares relate to a general increase in emotional reactivity or arousal during sleep remains unclear. To address this question, we recorded heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) during wakefulness, NREM and REM sleep in patients with nightmare disorder and healthy participants. The HEP represents a cortical (EEG) response to the heartbeat and indexes brain-body interactions, such as interoceptive processing and intrinsic levels of arousal. HEP amplitude is typically increased during states of high emotional arousal and motivation, and is decreased in depression. Here we compared the amplitude of HEPs between nightmare patients and healthy controls separately during AWAKE, NREM, REM periods, and found higher HEP amplitude in nightmare patients compared to healthy controls over a cluster of frontal regions only during REM sleep. This effect was not paralleled by any group difference in cardiac control measures (e.g. heart rate variability, interbeat interval). These findings corroborate the notion that nightmares are essentially a REM pathology and suggest that increased emotional arousal during REM sleep, as measured by HEP, is a physiological condition responsible for frequent nightmares. This result also supports that HEP may be used as a biomarker of increased emotional and sensory processing during REM sleep in these patients.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.