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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 70 » Issue 9
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, 1343–1346 (1993)

Long-range anticorrelations and non-Gaussian behavior of the heartbeat

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C.-K. Peng, J. Mietus, J. M. Hausdorff, S. Havlin, H. E. Stanley, and A. L. Goldberger
Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Cardiovascular Division, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Physical Sciences Laboratory, Division of Computer Research and Technology, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892

Received 15 October 1992; published in the issue dated 1 March 1993

We find that the successive increments in the cardiac beat-to-beat interals of healthy subjects display scale-invariant, long-range anticorrelations (up to 104 heart beats). Furthermore, we find that the histogram for the heartbeat intervals increments is well described by a Lévy stable distribution. For a group of subjects with severe heart disease, we find that the distribution is unchanged, but the long-range correlations vanish. Therefore, the different scaling behavior in health and disease must relate to the underlying dynamics of the heartbeat.

© 1993 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.1343
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.1343
PACS:
87.10.+e
 
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