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Heart-rate spectral analysis: A noninvasive probe of cardiovascular regulation in critically ill children with heart disease

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Summary

Children may die suddenly and unexpectedly following cardiac surgery, even while receiving intensive medical care, when current noninvasive and invasive monitoring techniques fail to warn us of an impending problem. This report examines the efficacy of heart-rate spectral analysis, a noninvasive method that quantitates the beat-to-beat fluctuations in heart rate, in characterizing and tracking cardiovascular regulatory status. A total of 45 heart-rate fluctuation studies, performed on selected patients, at the bedside, using heart-rate spectral analysis, were retrospectively correlated with clinical events. The spectral pattern of 18 patients who sustained a cardiac arrest differed significantly from the others in the study group (p<0.0001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine at Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

    David Gordon & Laura McAlpine

  2. Department of Cardiology, Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

    Victoria L. Herrera & Peter Lang

  3. Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT Center for Biomedical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Richard J. Cohen & Solange Akselrod

  4. Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, 34th Street and Civic Center Boulevard, 19104, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    William I. Norwood

Authors
  1. David Gordon
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  2. Victoria L. Herrera
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  3. Laura McAlpine
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  4. Richard J. Cohen
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  5. Solange Akselrod
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  6. Peter Lang
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  7. William I. Norwood
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Gordon, D., Herrera, V.L., McAlpine, L. et al. Heart-rate spectral analysis: A noninvasive probe of cardiovascular regulation in critically ill children with heart disease. Pediatr Cardiol 9, 69–77 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02083703

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