Comparison of heart rate variability measurements in infants

The relationship between heart rate variability (HRV) parameters is unclear and the optimum parameters to use for clinical application are not known. To address this problem, adult data are only available for a few of the numerous HRV parameters, and few data are available for infants. The purpose of this paper is to study the correlation of common HRV measurements for infants. Eight-hour polysomnogram recordings for 110 infants from the CHIME study are used to calculate HRV parameters for non-overlapping, successive 5 minute segments in the same sleep slates. For each pair of HRV parameters in each sleep state, Pearson´s correlation coefficient is computed for each individual and the bootstrap method is applied to calculate correlation for all infants. Results show high correlations between parameters where expected within and across domains. Some differences are noted compared to adult data.