The Effect of Age on the Heart Rate Variability of Healthy Subjects

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2021 Oct 8

PMID 34624048

Citations 33

Authors

Leopoldo Garavaglia

Damian Gulich

Magdalena M Defeo

Julieta Thomas Mailland

Isabel M Irurzun

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

In this work we study the characteristics of heart rate variability (HRV) as a function of age and gender. Our analysis covers a wider age range than that studied so far. It includes results previously reported in the literature and reveals behaviours not reported before. We can establish basic scale relationships in different HRV measurements. The mean value of the RR intervals shows a power-law behaviour independent of gender. Magnitudes such as the standard deviation or pNN50 show abrupt changes at around the age of 12 years, and above that age they show gender dependence, which mainly affects short-time (or high frequency) scales. We present a unified analysis for the calculation of the non-linear α and β parameters. Both parameters depend on age; they increase in the extremes of life and reach a minimum at around one year of age. These gender-independent changes occur at low frequencies and in scale ranges that depend on age. The results obtained in this work are discussed in terms of the effects of basal metabolic rate, hormonal regulation, and neuronal activity on heart rate variability. This work finally discusses how these findings influence the interpretation of HRV measurements from records of different lengths.

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