Scaling behavior in the heart rate variability characteristics with age

TL;DR

This study investigates how heart rate variability changes with age and gender, revealing new behaviors and scaling laws, and showing a decrease in system complexity as age increases, which relates to autonomic regulation.

Contribution

The paper extends the age range studied for HRV, reports new scaling behaviors, and links decreased system dimensionality to aging and autonomic regulation.

Findings

Identification of new scaling behaviors in HRV with age

Observation of abrupt changes in HRV measurements

Decrease in dynamic system dimensionality with age

Abstract

In this work we study the characteristics of the heart rate variability (HRV) as a function of age and gender. The analyzed data include previous results reported in the literature. The data obtained in this work expand the range of age studied until now revealing new behaviors not reported before. We analyze some measurements in the time domain,in the frequency domain and nonlinear measurements. We report scaling behaviors and abrupt changes in some measurements. There is also a progressive decrease in the dimensionality of the dynamic system governing the HRV, with the increase in age that is interpreted in terms ofautonomic regulation of cardiac activity.