A longitudinal study in youth of heart rate variability at rest and in response to stress

Abstract

Background-Few longitudinal studies have examined ethnic and sex differences, predictors and tracking stabilities of heart rate variability (HRV) at rest and in response to stress in youths and young adults. Results-AAs showed significantly higher resting root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) of normal R-R intervals and high-frequency (HF) power than EAs (Ps< 0.01). Females displayed larger decrease of RMSSD and HF during video game challenge than males (Ps< 0.05). These ethnic and sex differences were consistent across 1.5 years. No significant sex difference of resting HRV or ethnic difference of HRV response to stress was observed. In addition to age, ethnicity or sex, baseline resting HRV or HRV response to stress are predictors of the corresponding variables 1.5 years later (Ps< 0.01). Furthermore, weight gain indexed by either body mass index or waist circumference predicts declined resting HRV levels during follow up (Ps < 0.05). Tracking stabilities were high (>0.5) for resting HRV, but relatively low (<0.3) for HRV in response to stress. Methods-TwoConclusion-AAs show higher resting HRV than EAs, and females display greater HRV response to stress than males; and these ethnic and sex differences are consistent across 1.5 years. Resting HRV declines with weight gain.

Acute mental stress assessment via short term HRV analysis in healthy adults: A systematic review with meta-analysis

“…The majority of studies [6,13,15,[17][18][19][20] agreed that SDRR and HF decreased during stress, while LF/HF and LF increased during stress [1,6,12,14,16,17,19,20]. Regarding SDRR, only one study [14] out of the 4 [15,18,20] considering this measure, reported an increasing value during stress.…”

“…HRV measures in time and frequency domains, both linear and non-linear, were extracted by the papers included in this review [1,5,6,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Further details about HRV methodological conventions adopted in this review can be found in two open access papers [21,22].…”

“…Nine studies [1, 6, 12-14, 16, 17, 19, 20] used ANOVA, ANCOVA or t-student test to investigate how HRV measures changed before and after the stress section. Of these, Traina et al, Papousek et al, and Lackener et al [12,13,15] converted frequencies domain HRV features with a log transform, while the remaining applied directly standard statistical significance tests to frequency domain measures, which are not normally distributed, being asymmetric distributions of positive numbers [21,22]. The selected studies reported ECG recordings at rest (resting session, RS) and during induced mental stress sessions (stress session, StS).…”

Sympathetic and parasympathetic responses to social stress across adolescence

“…Hence, it would be reasonable to expect corresponding increases in tonic RSA (i.e., flexibility) and decreases in phasic SNS activation (i.e., arousal) due to social stress. Second, we considered whether there is a transition in adolescence between early maturational processes in which the PSNS activity increases and SNS activity decreases from infancy to adulthood (e.g., Massin & von Bernuth, 1997) and the subsequent PSNS decrease and SNS increase across the postadolescent lifespan (Pfeifer et al, 1983;Li et al, 2009). Thus, a pattern of lower PSNS and greater SNS across ages in our sample would suggest that the adult trends begin in adolescence.…”

Measurement fidelity of heart rate variability signal processing: The devil is in the details

“…Kubios-Several researchers report using an alternate strategy to clean data prior to using Kubios by deleting aberrant inter-beat intervals less than 300 and greater than 1200 ms (c.f., Capa et al, 2011;Li et al, 2009;Rodríguez-Colón et al, 2011;Timonen et al, 2006). Data were re-analyzed with Kubios after applying this commonly reported data cleaning strategy.…”