Dissecting Cardiovascular Responses to a Fixed-Interval Volitional Sighing Protocol Using a Mixed Modeling Approach.
Psychophysiology 2026 Neel Muzumdar, Kelly Sun, Samuel Zhang et al.
Sighing generates a reliable sympathetic cardiovascular response that, like exercise, could be leveraged in a graded "stress test" to reveal preclinical changes in cardiovascular health and stress reactivity. This study presents the fixed-interval volitional sighing (FIVS) protocol, which rhythmically paces sighs at different frequencies to systematically load the cardiovascular system....