Increase in regularity of fetal heart rate variability with age
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Peter Van Leeuwen
Abstract
It is generally assumed that fetal heart rate variability increases with gestation, reflecting prenatal development of the autonomic nervous system. We examined standard measures quantifying fetal heart rate variability, as well as a complexity measure, approximate entropy, in 66 fetal magnetocardiograms recorded from 22 healthy pregnant women between the 16th and 42nd week of gestation. In particular, regularity in the fetal RR interval time series was assessed on the basis of symbolic dynamics. The results showed that, beside an overall increase in fetal heart rate variability and complexity during pregnancy, there was also an increase in specific sets of binary patterns with low approximate entropy, i.e., a high degree of regularity. These sets were characterized by short epochs of heart rate acceleration and deceleration, and comparison with surrogate data confirmed that their random occurrence is rare. The results most likely reflect the influence of increasingly differentiated fetal behavioral states and transitions between them in association with fetal development.
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©2006 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- ESGCO 2006 Conference and Meeting of the European Study Group on Cardiovascular Oscillations, Jena, Germany, May 15–17, 2006
- Cardiovascular Oscillations: from methods and models to clinical applications
- Circadian and ultradian rhythms in heart rate variability
- Influence of age, body mass index, and blood pressure on the carotid intima-media thickness in normotensive and hypertensive patients
- Multivariate and multidimensional analysis of cardiovascular oscillations in patients with heart failure
- Multivariate and multiorgan analysis of cardiorespiratory variability signals: the CAP sleep case
- Role of the autonomic nervous system in generating non-linear dynamics in short-term heart period variability
- Non-linear dynamic analysis of the cardiac rhythm during transient myocardial ischemia
- Complex autonomic dysfunction in cardiovascular, intensive care, and schizophrenic patients assessed by autonomic information flow
- Low HRV entropy is strongly associated with myocardial infarction
- Revisiting the potential of time-domain indexes in short-term HRV analysis
- Fractal dimension in health and heart failure
- Spatiotemporal correlation analyses: a new procedure for standardisation of DC magnetocardiograms
- Changes in heart rate variability of athletes during a training camp
- The missing link between cardiovascular rhythm control and myocardial cell modeling
- Model of the sino-atrial and atrio-ventricular nodes of the conduction system of the human heart
- Modelling long-term heart rate variability: an ARFIMA approach
- Clinical correlates of non-linear indices of heart rate variability in chronic heart failure patients
- Recurrence analysis of nocturnal heart rate in sleep apnea patients
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- Complexity of heart rate fluctuations in near-term sheep and human fetuses during sleep
- Differences between heart rate and blood pressure variability in schizophrenia
- Influence of sympathetic vascular regulation on heart-rate scaling structure: spinal cord lesion as a model of progressively impaired autonomic control
- Increase in regularity of fetal heart rate variability with age
- Fetal heart rate variability in growth restricted fetuses
- Frequency modulation between low- and high-frequency components of the heart rate variability spectrum
- Mixed predictability and cross-validation to assess non-linear Granger causality in short cardiovascular variability series
- Assessment of spatial organization in the atria during paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and adrenergic stimulation
- Attenuated autonomic function in multiple organ dysfunction syndrome across three age groups
- Central vasopressin V1a and V1b receptors modulate the cardiovascular response to air-jet stress in conscious rats
- Heart rate asymmetry by Poincaré plots of RR intervals
- Analyses of cardiovascular oscillations for enhanced diagnosis and risk stratification in cardiac diseases and disorders
