Assessment of cardiovascular regulation through irreversibility analysis of heart period variability: a 24 hours Holter study in healthy and chronic heart failure populations
Open Access
- 27 February 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by The Royal Society in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Vol. 367 (1892), 1359-1375
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2008.0265
Abstract
We propose an approach based on time reversibility analysis to characterize the cardiovascular regulation and its nonlinearities as derived from 24 hours Holter recordings of heart period variability in a healthy population ( n =12, age: median=43 years, range=34–55 years) and in a pathological group of age-matched chronic heart failure (CHF) patients ( n =13, primarily in NYHA class II, age: median=37 years, range=33–56 years, ejection fraction: median=25%, range=13–30%). Two indices capable of detecting nonlinear irreversible dynamics according to different strategies of phase-space reconstruction (i.e. a fixed two-dimensional phase-space reconstruction and an optimal selection of the embedding dimension, respectively) are tested and compared with a more traditional nonlinear index based on local nonlinear prediction. Results showed that nonlinear dynamics owing to time irreversibility at short time scales are significantly present during daytime in healthy subjects, more frequently present in the CHF population and less frequently during night-time in both groups, thus suggesting their link with a dominant sympathetic regulation and/or with a vagal withdrawal. On the contrary, nonlinear dynamics owing to time irreversibility at longer, dominant time scales were insignificantly present in both groups. During daytime in the healthy population, irreversibility was mostly due to the presence of asymmetric patterns characterized by bradycardic runs shorter than tachycardic ones. Nonlinear dynamics produced by mechanisms different from those inducing temporal irreversibility were significantly detectable in both groups and more frequently during night-time. The present study proposes a method to distinguish different types of nonlinearities and assess their contribution over different temporal scales. Results confirm the usefulness of this method even when applied in uncontrolled experimental conditions such as those during 24 hours Holter recordings.Keywords
This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:
- Temporal asymmetries of short-term heart period variability are linked to autonomic regulationAmerican Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, 2008
- Multiple testing strategy for the detection of temporal irreversibility in stationary time seriesPhysical Review E, 2008
- Nonlinear Indices of Heart Rate Variability in Chronic Heart Failure Patients: Redundancy and Comparative Clinical ValueJournal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology, 2007
- Heart rate asymmetry by Poincaré plots of RR intervalsBiomedizinische Technik/Biomedical Engineering, 2006
- Broken Asymmetry of the Human Heartbeat: Loss of Time Irreversibility in Aging and DiseasePhysical Review Letters, 2005
- System identification: a multi-signal approach for probing neural cardiovascular regulationPhysiological Measurement, 2005
- Asymmetrical singularities in real-world signalsPhysical Review E, 2003
- Detecting Time’s Arrow: a method for identifying nonlinearity and deterministic chaos in time-series dataProceedings Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 1996
- Power Spectrum Analysis of Heart Rate Fluctuation: A Quantitative Probe of Beat-to-Beat Cardiovascular ControlScience, 1981
- Time-reversibility of linear stochastic processesJournal of Applied Probability, 1975