Hello all. I see that you are proposing to measure HRV before, during and after sleep. What is the reasoning behind that? Does it comes from your own data or do you have some reference paper that support this hypothesis?
Many Thanks,
Patrick
Researchers at the University of Salzburg, Austria and the University of California wanted to test the idea that if daytime heart rate variability (HRV) is strongly linked to physical and mental health, would HRV also be a predictor of healthy sleep? Surprisingly, this has not been tested rigorously before, although HRV during sleep has been assessed in several previous studies.
Researchers found significant correlations to daytime HRV for the following variables:
1)Sleep latency (i.e. time taken to fall asleep);2) Number of arousals;3)HRV during sleep
4)Sleep questionnaire total score
A higher daytime HRV predicted a shorter time to fall asleep and less arousals during the night, as well as a better sleep questionnaire score. In contrast they found no significant relation to total sleep time or sleep efficiency (time asleep / total time in bed).Interestingly, higher daytime HRV was associated with better subjective and objective sleep quality, and the authors go on to suggest that daytime parasympathetic HRV (i.e. HF or RMSSD) is associated with the flexible regulation of arousal. This makes HRV a key marker once again, of internal processes, this time in the transition from wakefulness to sleep. This makes sense if we think about HRV as an indicator of parasympathetic rest and digest activity, and the counterpoint of the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ state. In a natural environment, animals would only fall asleep quickly and sleep soundly when they feel safe and are not stressed.
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Dear Tatiyana,
Many thanks for your insights and link to papers. I refer to the paper: Neuropattern: A new translational tool to detect and treat stress pathology I. Strategical consideration, where he authors explicitly state (p.484), "The standardized protocol contains a baseline measure under calm sitting conditions directly before bedtime, an over- night measure, and a final measure immediately after awakening, again under calm sitting conditions. The HRV measure after awakening is considered a response measure, as compared to the evening measure. Variability of inter-beat intervals is analyzed to estimate sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. HRV data were scaled on 1860 healthy subjects and corrected for effects of sex, age, and body mass index. Values in the lower and upper quartiles, as well as deviations of 20 percentiles between evening and morning measures are included for analysis."
So my question was precisely addressing this protocol (in Italic above): Why doing measures before and after sleep, and not only during sleep?
Many thanks for discussing this very interesting point.
Patrick
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