Grossman P, van Beek J, Wientjes C
Department of Psychophysiology, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Psychophysiology. 1990 Nov;27(6):702-14. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1990.tb03198.x.
The empirical literature has shown that respiratory sinus arrhythmia is a sensitive noninvasive index of parasympathetic cardiac control. Nevertheless there has been no general agreement among investigators as to the most preferable quantification technique for assessing respiratory sinus arrhythmia, although there has been much speculation that specific estimation techniques are more or less reflective of vagal processes and could be more or less contaminated by other influences upon heart period variability unrelated to respiration. This study compared three quantification procedures for estimating respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA): (1) a spectral analytic technique, (2) a complex detrending approach removing periodic and aperiodic cardiac variations unrelated to respiration, and (3) a time-domain, peak-valley procedure employing inspiratory and expiratory periods as windows for determining range of cardiac-interval fluctuations associated with respiratory phase. Measures derived from these techniques were intra- and interindividually compared using three different samples of male subjects, including students, adult normotensives, and adult hypertensives. All interindividual correlations between measures yielded coefficients above .92 and the mean within-subject correlation across 42 individuals was .96, thus indicating a marked degree of comparability between measures. Additionally, given that much evidence indicates lawful within-individual relations between RSA amplitude and respiratory parameters, we employed respiratory period as an external criterion and compared intraindividual correlations between this variable and (2) and (3); results showed that (3) was significantly more highly associated with respiration than was (2), although the mean r's for the two measures did not diverge greatly (.91 vs. .84). Finally, inspection of the data and further regression analyses did not suggest that any of the RSA estimates were differentially contaminated by other components of cardiac variability. Our findings suggest that the three techniques are almost equivalent as indices of cardiac vagal tone and would appear to ease concerns about the inferiority of any of the procedures. Choice of a quantification procedure should therefore be tailored to the specific empirical needs of an investigation. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed.
实证文献表明，呼吸性窦性心律失常是心脏副交感神经控制的一个敏感的非侵入性指标。然而，尽管有很多推测认为特定的估计技术或多或少能反映迷走神经过程，并且可能或多或少受到与呼吸无关的其他影响心脏周期变异性因素的干扰，但研究人员对于评估呼吸性窦性心律失常的最优选量化技术尚未达成普遍共识。本研究比较了三种估计呼吸性窦性心律失常（RSA）的量化程序：（1）一种频谱分析技术，（2）一种去除与呼吸无关的周期性和非周期性心脏变化的复杂去趋势方法，以及（3）一种时域峰谷程序，采用吸气期和呼气期作为窗口来确定与呼吸相位相关的心脏间期波动范围。使用包括学生、成年血压正常者和成年高血压患者在内的三组不同男性受试者样本，对这些技术得出的测量值进行了个体内和个体间比较。测量值之间的所有个体间相关性系数均高于0.92，42名个体的受试者内平均相关性为0.96，因此表明测量值之间具有显著的可比性。此外，鉴于大量证据表明RSA幅度与呼吸参数之间存在个体内的规律关系，我们将呼吸周期作为外部标准，并比较了该变量与（2）和（3）之间的个体内相关性；结果表明，尽管两种测量方法的平均r值差异不大（0.91对0.84），但（3）与呼吸的相关性明显高于（2）。最后，对数据的检查和进一步的回归分析并未表明任何RSA估计值受到心脏变异性其他成分的不同程度干扰。我们的研究结果表明，这三种技术作为心脏迷走神经张力指标几乎等效，似乎可以减轻对任何一种程序劣势的担忧。因此，量化程序的选择应根据研究的具体实证需求进行调整。讨论了每种方法的优缺点。
