Heart rate variability and treatment outcome in major depression: A pilot study

• We examined associations between heart rate variability and depression treatment.
• We utilized studies of antidepressant medication and yoga.
• Very low frequency power was negatively associated with depression improvement.
• Very low frequency power may be a biomarker for depression treatment outcome.

Variations in heart rate variability (HRV) have been associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), but the relationship of baseline HRV to treatment outcome in MDD is unclear. We conducted a pilot study to examine associations between resting baseline HRV and MDD treatment outcome. We retrospectively tested several parameters of HRV in an MDD treatment study with escitalopram (ESC, N = 26) to generate a model of how baseline HRV related to treatment outcome, and cross-validated the model in a separate trial of MDD treatment with Iyengar yoga (IY, N = 16). Lower relative power of very low frequency (rVLF) HRV at baseline predicted improvement in depressive symptoms when adjusted for age and gender (R2 > .43 and p < 0.05 for both trials). Although vagal parasympathetic measures were correlated with antidepressant treatment outcome, their predictive power was not significant after adjusting for age and gender. In conclusion, baseline resting rVLF was associated with depression treatment outcome in two independent MDD treatment studies. These results should be interpreted with caution due to limited sample size, but a strength of this study is its validation of the rVLF predictor in an independent sample. rVLF merits prospective confirmation as a candidate biomarker.