Key result
RR-interval fluctuation scale distinguishes healthy subjects from patients with AF or CHF.
Why the study?
The modeling and quantification of RR-interval fluctuations in healthy, CHF, and AF subjects to distinguish these groups and assess severity were not established.
Can the scale parameter of non-Gaussian stable distributions modeling RR-interval fluctuations distinguish between healthy, CHF, and AF subjects?
Observational
Can the scale parameter of non-Gaussian stable distributions modeling RR-interval fluctuations distinguish between healthy, CHF, and AF subjects?
The scale parameter of non-Gaussian stable distributions modeling RR-interval fluctuations can robustly distinguish between healthy individuals, those with heart failure, and those with atrial fibrillation.
We show that the RR-interval fluctuations, defined as the difference between successive natural-logarithm of the RR interval, for healthy, congestive-heart-failure (CHF) and atrial-fibrillation (AF) subjects are well modeled by non-Gaussian stable distributions.Our results suggest that healthy or unhealthy RR-interval fluctuation can generally be modeled as a sum of a large number of independent physiological effects which are identically distributed with infinite variance.Furthermore, we show for the first time that one indicator -the scale parameter of the stable distribution-is sufficient to robustly distinguish the three groups of subjects.The scale parameters for healthy subjects are smaller than those for AF subjects but larger than those for CHF subjects -this ordering suggests that the scale parameter could be used to objectively quantify the severity of CHF and AF over time and also serve as an early warning signal for a healthy person when it approaches either boundary of the healthy range.
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Lan et al. (2013) conducted an observational in Congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation. RR-interval fluctuations vs. Healthy subjects was evaluated on Distinguishing subject groups using the scale parameter of the stable distribution. The scale parameter of RR-interval fluctuations robustly distinguished healthy subjects from those with atrial fibrillation (larger scale) or congestive heart failure (smaller scale).
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