TY  - JOUR
AU  - Scheitz, Jan F
AU  - Villringer, Arno
AU  - Mikail, Nidaa
AU  - Gebhard, Catherine
AU  - Endres, Matthias
TI  - Bidirectional brain-heart interactions in health and disease.
JO  - Nature reviews / Neurology
VL  - 22
IS  - 4
SN  - 1759-4758
CY  - London
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
M1  - DZNE-2026-00362
SP  - 209 - 225
PY  - 2026
AB  - The brain and heart constantly communicate with each other to adapt to changes in the environment. In recent years, we have seen increasing recognition that brain-heart interactions influence many cognitive and behavioural functions, and that disturbances in this bidirectional relationship can have detrimental effects on both organs. Clinically, such disturbances can manifest as cardiac dysfunction following acute psychological stress or a brain injury such as acute ischaemic stroke, or as cognitive disorders in patients with acute or chronic heart disease. In this Review, we provide an overview of the physiological interaction between the heart and the brain and show how injury or dysfunction in one of these organs can lead to dysfunction in the other. We describe the current state of knowledge on neuronal correlates and humoral mediators of brain-heart interactions, as well as state-of-the-art methods for studying these interactions. We highlight the clinical implications of disturbances in physiological brain-heart communication for various clinical conditions, including Takotsubo syndrome resulting from emotional stress or from brain disorders, cardiac complications after stroke (so-called stroke-heart syndrome), and cognitive dysfunction in patients with cardiac diseases such as heart failure and atrial fibrillation. In addition, we address sex and gender differences in this bidirectional relationship.
KW  - Humans
KW  - Brain: physiology
KW  - Brain: physiopathology
KW  - Heart Diseases: physiopathology
KW  - Heart: physiology
KW  - Heart: physiopathology
KW  - Animals
KW  - Stress, Psychological: physiopathology
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:41927938
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41582-025-01180-w
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/285916
ER  -