We are working with an industry partner who has developed screening kiosks for general population assessment of physical and mental health. They are measuring HRV, and I want to know if the objective HRV data at an individual level might add predictive variance over and above self-report measures (e.g., K10) in the prediction of high prevalence mental disorders.
HRV is also a predictor of bad cardiovascular outcomes. As a secondary question, are there holistic models predicting multimorbidity (which might use HRV, blood pressure, self-reported anxiey, etc. as a screen for multimorbidity risk)
There is large inter/intra-individual variability in HRV. Although certain mental disorders such as depression may be associated with lower HRV, that itself can be due to antidepressant medications, whether HRV can predict development of mental disorder is not well investigated yet. Note that measuring resting state HRV requires standard setup since many factors can influence the measure. The other informative measure is HRV reactivity to psychological/physical stress tests.
Anyway, I doubt that an accurate cut-off can be determined for predicting development of mental disorders in future using just HRV indexes mainly because of several other individual and contextual factors that can influence this measure. It is true that lower resting HRV is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular diseases in future but just having association does not mean that an accurate prediction can be achieved.
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