Brain Regions and Autonomic Control – Regulation of Ambulatory Blood Pressure (ABP)

00:00 So where are the information sent to? We talked about cardiovascular control centers but really where are they located specifically in the brain? They are going to be in the medulla. The medulla receives the sensory information and it receives it through a specialized locale called the NTS or the nucleus tractus solitarius. Other areas that are important for the autonomic control of blood pressure involve the hypothalamus, the cerebral cortex as well as some spinal efferents are also important. So why would a place like the cerebral cortex be important for the governing of arterial blood pressure? Well your cognitive thought process whether you're relaxed or you're tensed, you know you're going to do a particular activity that's all governed by your ability to think and to control your movements. The hypothalamus though is going to be that spot that is more controlled by autonomic automatic types of effects. Both of which will have some input to these medullary regions. So now let's break out these medullary regions to a greater degree so we can focus on what areas were most important. So where does the information received in the medulla? We said earlier that that was part of the NTS. So baroreceptors send their signal to the NTS. The NTS passes that information on to the vagal and the sympathetic components. Now, the sympathetic components would be the cardioacceleratory region and the vasomotor center region. The vagal nucleus is where the cardioinhibitory region is located. So our three nerves that we had in some of the previous examples that we've utilized involve those three processes: vasomotor, cardiostimulatory and cardioinhibitory. Those are our various nuclei that we need to be most concerned with. Now, the hypothalamus and higher centers will need to also provide some input. The input they provide is either directly on to the NTS or to some of the sympathetically mediated regions.

02:40 So these higher brain centers can function and control the system even though this is more of a primal or basic reflex.