Sleep-Wake Differences in Scaling Behavior of the Human Heartbeat Analysis of Terrestrial a.pdfVIP

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 9 9 1 1 0 7 3 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .s t a t - m e c h ] 5 N o v 1 9 9 9 EUROPHYSICS LETTERS x xxxxxx 1999 Europhys. Lett., 4x (x), pp. x-x (1999) Sleep-Wake Differences in Scaling Behavior of the Human Heartbeat: Analysis of Terrestrial and Long-Term Space Flight Data Plamen Ch. Ivanov1,2(?), Armin Bunde3, Lu??s A. Nunes Amaral1,2, Shlomo Havlin4, Janice Fritsch-Yelle5, Roman M. Baevsky6, H. Eugene Stanley1, and Ary L. Goldberger2 1 Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA 2 Cardiovascular Division, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Cen- ter, Boston, MA 02215, USA 3 Institute fu?r Theoretische Physik III, Justus-Liebig-Universita?t, Giessen, Germany 4 Gonda Goldschmid Center and Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel 5 Life Sciences Research Laboratories, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77058, USA 6 Institute of Biomedical Problems, Moscow, Russia (received ; accepted ) PACS. 87.. – Biological and medical physics. PACS. 87.19.Hh– Cardiac dynamics. PACS. 87.19.Jj – Circadian rhythms. PACS. 87.10.+e – General theory and mathematical aspects. Abstract. – We compare scaling properties of the cardiac dynamics during sleep and wake periods for healthy individuals, cosmonauts during orbital flight, and subjects with severe heart disease. For all three groups, we find a greater degree of anticorrelation in the heartbeat fluctuations during sleep compared to wake periods. The sleep-wake difference in the scaling exponents for the three groups is comparable to the difference between healthy and diseased individuals. The observed scaling differences are not accounted for simply by different levels of activity, but appear related to intrinsic changes in the neuroautonomic control of the heartbeat. The normal electrical activity of the heart is usually described as a “regular sinus rhythm” [1, 2]. However, cardiac interbeat intervals