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Quantitative Models for Microscopic to Macroscopic Biological Macromolecules and Tissues pp 87–109Cite as

Homeostasis from a Time-Series Perspective: An Intuitive Interpretation of the Variability of Physiological Variables

Abstract

Homeostasis implies the approximate constancy of specific regulated variables, where the independence of the internal from the external environment is ensured by adaptive physiological responses carried out by other so-called effector variables. The loss of homeostasis is the basis to understand chronic-degenerative disease and age-associated frailty. Technological advances presently allow to monitor a large variety of physiological variables in a non-invasive and continuous way and the statistics of the resulting physiological time series is thought to reflect the dynamics of the underlying control mechanisms. Recent years have seen an increased interest in the variability and/or complexity analysis of physiological time series with possible applications in pathophysiology. However, a general understanding is lacking for which variables variability is an indicator of good health (e.g., heart rate variability) and when on the contrary variability implies a risk factor (e.g., blood pressure variability). In the present contribution, we argue that in optimal conditions of youth and health regulated variables and effector variables necessarily exhibit very different statistics, with small and large variances, respectively, and that under adverse circumstances such as ageing and/or chronic-degenerative disease these statistics degenerate in opposite directions, i.e. towards an increased variability in the case of regulated variables and towards a decreased variability for effector variables. We demonstrate this hypothesis for a simple mathematical model of a thermostat, and for blood pressure and body temperature homeostasis for healthy controls and patients with metabolic disease, and suggest that this scheme may explain the general phenomenology of physiological variables of homeostatic regulatory mechanisms.

Keywords

  • Homeostasis
  • Physiological regulation
  • Control theory
  • Control systems
  • Continuous monitoring
  • Time series
  • Early-warning signals
  • Complexity
  • Fractal physiology
  • Variability
  • Heart rate variability
  • HRV
  • Blood pressure variability
  • BPV
  • Body temperature

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The skin of course does have its own thermosensors, but they are part of a reflex loop and not of a local homeostatic control loop: when touching something extremely warm or cold, there will be an automatic reaction to move the fingers away, but not a physiological response to locally cool off or warm up the skin to maintain a constant skin temperature.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico (DGAPA) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) grants IN106215, IV100116 and IA105017, from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) grants Fronteras 2015-2-1093, Fronteras 2016-01-2277 and CB-2011-01-167441, and the Newton Advanced Fellowship awarded to R.F. by the Academy of Medical Sciences through the UK Government’s Newton Fund programme. We are grateful to Alejandro Frank and Christopher Stephens for fruitful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Ruben Fossion & Ana Leonor Rivera

  2. Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Ruben Fossion, Ana Leonor Rivera, Octavio A. Lecona, Juan C. Toledo-Roy & Bruno Estañol

  3. Belgian Association of Medical Acupuncture (ABMA-BVGA), Brussels, Belgium

    Jean Pierre J. Fossion

  4. Maestría en Dinámica No Lineal y Sistemas Complejos, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Octavio A. Lecona

  5. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Karla P. García-Pelagio

  6. Posgrado en Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Lorena García-Iglesias

  7. Laboratorio de Neurofisiología Clínica, Departamento de Neurología y Psiquiatría, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición “Salvador Zubirán”, Mexico City, Mexico

    Bruno Estañol

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  1. Ruben Fossion
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Correspondence to Ruben Fossion .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM), Mexico City, Mexico

    Dr. Luis Olivares-Quiroz

  2. Human Systems Biology Laboratory, Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica (INMEGEN), México City, Mexico

    Dr. Osbaldo Resendis-Antonio

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Fossion, R. et al. (2018). Homeostasis from a Time-Series Perspective: An Intuitive Interpretation of the Variability of Physiological Variables. In: Olivares-Quiroz, L., Resendis-Antonio, O. (eds) Quantitative Models for Microscopic to Macroscopic Biological Macromolecules and Tissues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73975-5_5

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