title: Aging and the complexity of cardiovascular dynamics.
abstract: Biomedical signals often vary in a complex and irregular manner. Analysis of variability in such signals generally does not address directly their complexity, and so may miss potentially useful information. We analyze the complexity of heart rate and beat-to-beat blood pressure using two methods motivated by nonlinear dynamics (chaos theory). A comparison of a group of healthy elderly subjects with healthy young adults indicates that the complexity of cardiovascular dynamics is reduced with aging. This suggests that complexity of variability may be a useful physiological marker.
authors.affiliation: Colin Research America, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.
authors.forename: D T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Kaplan
authors.forename: M I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Furman
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Pincus
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Ryan
authors.forename: L A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Lipsitz
authors.forename: A L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Goldberger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001794:Blood Pressure; D002320:Cardiovascular Physiological Phenomena; D002319:Cardiovascular System / Q000254:growth & development; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D008433:Mathematics; D008955:Models, Cardiovascular; D012016:Reference Values