Key result
Older age is associated with lower cardiovascular complexity, characterized using as few as ~10 RR intervals.
Why the study?
Aging reduces the complexity of physiological interactions in cardiac control mechanisms, necessitating determination of minimum RR tachogram length for complexity analysis.
What is the minimum length of RR tachogram required to characterize the complexity of healthy young and old hearts using LZ, SampEn, and ETC?
Cross-Sectional
What is the minimum length of RR tachogram required to characterize the complexity of healthy young and old hearts using LZ, SampEn, and ETC?
Lempel-Ziv complexity and Effort-To-Compress are effective measures for analyzing cardiovascular dynamics using very short RR tachograms (as few as 10 samples).
LZ/ETC detect lower cardiac complexity in aging from ~10-beat RR intervals; leaves open clinical utility pending validation.
As we age, our hearts undergo changes that result in a reduction in complexity of physiological interactions between different control mechanisms. This results in a potential risk of cardiovascular diseases which are the number one cause of death globally. Since cardiac signals are nonstationary and nonlinear in nature, complexity measures are better suited to handle such data. In this study, three complexity measures are used, namely Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ), Sample Entropy (SampEn) and Effort-To-Compress (ETC). We determined the minimum length of RR tachogram required for characterizing complexity of healthy young and healthy old hearts. All the three measures indicated significantly lower complexity values for older subjects than younger ones. However, the minimum length of heart-beat interval data needed differs for the three measures, with LZ and ETC needing as low as 10 samples, whereas SampEn requires at least 80 samples. Our study indicates that complexity measures such as LZ and ETC are good candidates for the analysis of cardiovascular dynamics since they are able to work with very short RR tachograms.
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Balasubramanian et al. (2016) conducted a cross-sectional in Healthy aging. Older age vs. Younger age was evaluated on Cardiovascular complexity measured by Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZ), Sample Entropy (SampEn) and Effort-To-Compress (ETC). Older age was associated with significantly lower cardiovascular complexity than younger age, with LZ and ETC measures requiring as few as 10 RR tachogram samples for characterization.
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