Long before birth, the tissues of our heart coract and expand with a certain rhythm, and these movemes stop only in the last hour of our life.
According to RCO News Agency, This is a very mechanical function. However, each coraction is considered like a musician’s note, played with gusto or tenderness under the guidance of nerves that lie just beneath the outer layers of the heart.
These pathways, known as the iracardiac nervous system, were thought to act as a stop-off poi for information transmitted by parts of the brain and spinal cord, according to ScienceAlert.
Scieists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Columbia University in the United States have now discovered a surprising level of complexity among the neurons that surround the zebrafish heart, challenging existing theories about how the organ maiains its pulse in differe species, including our own.
Konstainos Ampatzis, a neuroscieist at the Karolinska Institute, who led the study, says: This “little brain” plays a key role in maiaining and corolling the heart rate, and is similar to how the brain regulates rhythmic functions such as moveme and breathing. Throughout history, cardiac activity was thought to be autonomic.
Albrecht von Haller, an 18th ceury German anatomist, claimed in his Compendium of Physiology that the heart has an “irinsic excitability” caused by the blood eering it.
In the 19th ceury, bundles of nerves called ganglia were found in the hearts of frogs and then in the hearts of humans, which were quickly understood to act as a pacemaker for the heart, corolling the rate of muscle coractions.
This marked the beginning of ceuries of research io the heart’s steady ability to beat, and scieists studied the exte to which the ceral nervous system corols the pulse.
Today, it is believed that the brain affects the function of the heart through the sympathetic “fight or flight” system and the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system.
This is managed through numerous neural pathways that connect the convoluted muscle fibers of the heart to the peripheral ganglia, which in turn are connected to bundles of neurons in the ceral nervous system and remotely alter the rate in response to chemical and pressure stimuli.
Given the scrutiny of generations of scieists, not only is it not surprising that the debate over the brain’s influence on the heart coinues, but there is still much to be discovered about the structure of the heart.
Ampatzis and his team used a combination of immunolabeling, Aran profiling of individual cells, and analysis of the electrical properties of neurons passing through cardiac tissue to produce a detailed map of the iracardiac nervous system of a zebrafish heart.
The researchers discovered a high diversity of cell types, including a subset of neurons that resemble ceral pattern-generating neurons in the ceral nervous system, pathways that corol everything from chewing food to walking.
Despite an evolutionary gap of hundreds of millions of years, humans and zebrafish have surprisingly similar cardiovascular physiology, suggesting that most vertebrates share these neural pathways.
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