Analysis of heartbeat time series from young subjects with metabolic syndrome

This paper examines the presence of metabolic syndrome (MS) in young university students of medicine (18 to 20 years old). More than 10% of students were diagnosed with MS, academic outcomes of such students during a semester showed that the grades of young people with MS were significantly lower than those of healthy young people. Multifractal analysis was applied to analyze heartbeat time series obtained from 24-hour Holter records of these subjects. In general, the behavior of healthy young heartbeat time series with MS is not significantly different. Multifractal spectra of healthy subjects are wide and right skewed. However, when we analyzed the symmetry of the spectra of young people with MS, we have found some anomalous behavior in some series of young people with MS, where spectra are right skewed. On the other hand, multifractal spectra of heartbeat time series of young MS people when they are asleep have a different behavior with the heartbeat time series when they are awake.