Investigation of respiratory and heart rate variability in hypertensive patients

In this paper, in order to examine the effect of respiration on heart rate variability (HRV), signal processing analyses were performed between the signal received from the periodic movement of the chest of respiration and the pulse plethysmograph (PPS) signal, providing the calculation of both the time and frequency behavior of HRV and also including pulse rate information at the same time. Respiration is used as the comparison parameter in both healthy subjects and in hypertensive patients, not only with the time and frequency components of the HRV, but also with the galvanic skin resistance simultaneously taken with body temperature and by calculating these signal changes. In our study, we aim to not only investigate the relationship between hypertension and HRV, but also to investigate the effect of respiration. Hence, in this study, 19 hypertensive patients and 19 healthy controls, who are all women, are used as subjects. As a result of the data received and analyzed from the subjects, HRV both in hypertensive and healthy subjects, the mean value of the high-frequency component and respiratory signal (RSP), and the mean value of the low-frequency/high-frequency ratio accepted as a sympathovagal balance index of the heart rate and RSP are statistically associated.