Key result
Multiscale blood pressure and heart rate variations correlate with space weather and solar activity cycles.
Why the study?
Assessing influences of space weather on human physiology often relies on correlations that disregard shared periodicities between biological and environmental systems, leading to potential spurious results.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Chronobiological approaches to longitudinal blood pressure and heart rate monitoring provide robust analytical techniques for studying environmental effects and offer clinical applications.
Assessing influences of space weather on human physiology often relies on correlations between the socio-biological variableand the environment.One major pitfall of such an approach is the disregard for periodicities characterizing both biology and nature, many of them shared between the two systems.Alternative, more robust analytical techniques of time series analysis, such as those used in chronobiology, are better suited to avoid spurious results.Blood pressure and heart rate are highly variable along several time scales, ranging from the fast oscillations of the brain and heart to the multi-decadal cycles associated with changes in solar activity.Since these variables can be easily monitored longitudinally, they lend themselves well to the study of helio-geomagnetic effects from a basic science viewpoint.At the same time, such physiological monitoring offers useful clinical applications.
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Cornélissen et al. (2021) conducted a review in Cardiovascular physiology (Blood pressure and heart rate variability). Space weather and chronobiological cycles was evaluated. Blood pressure and heart rate exhibit significant variability along multiple time scales, including circaseptan, cis-half-year, and circadecadal cycles that correlate with space weather and solar activity.
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