Editorial: Between Breaths

Fast breaths, slow breaths, small breaths, big breaths: importance of vagal innervation in the newborn lung.

IT IS WELL ESTABLISHED that vagally innervated mechanoreceptors in the lung influence respiratory frequency and the occurrence of spontaneous sighs (augmented breaths). Are these reflexes vitally important, or do they merely “fine tune” the respiratory pattern? The remarkable vitality and long-term survival of human patients and laboratory animals after denervation associated with lung transpla...

The cyanide gasp and spontaneous deep breaths.

Stimulation of the carotid body chemoreceptors with cyanide in anaesthetized rabbits usually causes a deep breath or gasp, but only if the vagus nerves are intact. This gasp has several similarities with spontaneous deep breaths in eupnoea. In paralysed rabbits, artificially ventilated, chemoreceptor stimulation induces an augmented discharge in the phrenic nerve equivalent to a gasp. In sponta...

Detecting Breaths in Capnography Time Series

Finding individual breaths is essential in the classification of respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The identification task may become quite difficult if the sampling rates of available physiological measurements are low, as in the HR3Modul decision support system. We introduce an improved respiration analysis of the HR3Modul system that uses an Euclidian distance based Nearest-Neighbour classificat...

Hypocapnia increases the prevalence of hypoxia-induced augmented breaths.

Augmented breaths promote respiratory instability and have been implicated in triggering periods of sleep-disordered breathing. Since respiratory instability is well known to be exacerbated by hypocapnia, we asked whether one of the destabilizing effects of hypocapnia might be related to an increased prevalence of augmented breaths. With this question in mind, we first sought to determine wheth...

Editorial: Metabolic Interactions Between Bacteria and Phytoplankton