Abstract
We find that the successive increments in the cardiac beat-to-beat interals of healthy subjects display scale-invariant, long-range anticorrelations (up to 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.
- Received 15 October 1992
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.70.1343
©1993 American Physical Society