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- Title
Sustained Anxiety Scores are Associated with the Fractal Dynamics of the Heartbeat in Early Adolescents.
- Authors
la Torre-Luque, Alejandro De; Balle, Maria; Fiol-Veny, Aina; Llabrés, Jordi; Bornas, Xavier
- Abstract
The risk of suffering anxiety disorders is associated with sustained subthreshold symptoms of anxiety. This study evaluated the stability of anxiety scores (high, moderate or low) across a six-month period in early adolescents (N = 95). The associations between sustained anxiety, vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV), sympathetic activity, and heart rate fractal dynamics in everyday life conditions were analyzed. The anxiety scores from 71.50% of participants remained at the same level. The linear correlations between anxiety and cardiac measures were weak but a group-based approach revealed that the fractal dimension (FD) from stable-low anxiety participants was higher than the FD from participants with stable-moderate anxiety scores but not higher than the FD from the stable-high anxiety group. The short-term correlations’ exponent α1 from the stable-high anxiety group was higher than the α1 from the stable-moderate anxiety group but not higher than the exponent from the stablelow anxiety group. No differences were found in the vmHRV nor sympathetic activity. The lack of a direct association between the complexity of the heart rate and the level of sustained anxiety suggests a nonlinear pattern of associations that would be in accordance with the optimum variability principle.
- Subjects
HEART beat; TEENAGERS; FRACTAL dimensions; ANXIETY; ANXIETY disorders; LYAPUNOV exponents
- Publication
Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology & Life Sciences, 2018, Vol 22, Issue 3, p313
- ISSN
1090-0578
- Publication type
Article