Dynamics of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) was traced by automatic monitoring every 30 min uninterruptedly along several months in a patient suffering from combined atrial fibrillation and heart failure during the development of disease and its therapeutic and surgical treatment (pacemaker implanting and atrioventricular ablation). Analyses of spectral components as well as signal's shape revealed instabilities in circadian and semicircadian parameters. A new approach for signal's form description without using cosine approximation is suggested.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF"Chronoastrobiology: are we at the threshold of a new science? Is there a critical mass for scientific research?" A simple photograph of the planet earth from outer space was one of the greatest contributions of space exploration. It drove home in a glance that human survival depends upon the wobbly dynamics in a thin and fragile skin of water and gas that covers a small globe in a mostly cold and vast universe. This image raised the stakes in understanding our place in that universe, in finding out where we came from and in choosing a path for survival.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHalf-hourly systolic (S) and diastolic (D) blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) monitoring with gaps demonstrates transient elevations of unknown origin of the chronome (time structure)-adjusted mean, the MESOR, M, of BP, and of the circadian double amplitude of BP of TS, a clinically healthy-appearing engineering student who was 27 years of age at the start of the study. An assessment of large and small arterial vessel elasticity was in keeping with no detection of functional or structural alteration in her vasculature. The recovery of normality in BP endpoints at the time of this report is speculatively associated with a weight loss of 40 pounds and the formation of a friendship by correspondence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA scientific optimization may become possible in ethics to the extent to which any reproducible since cyclic features of spirituality and of criminality become measurable. Should either or both the 'good' or the 'bad' be found to be at least passively influenced by cyclic physical environmental factors, as is putatively the case, these aspects of behavior may eventually become actively manipulable, perhaps utilizable for human survival. Toward this goal, chronomics has already mapped time structures in religious behavior that can lead to a study of underlying geographic/geomagnetic latitude-associated mechanisms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe honor Theo Hellbrugge's acclaimed endeavors in the rehabilitation, or rather the prehabilitation of handicapped children. So far, he has focused on obvious handicaps, and we trust that he will include concern for everybody's silent handicaps in the future by screening for abnormal variability inside the physiological range. Therein, we introduce cis- and trans-years, components of transdisciplinary spectra that are novel for biology and also in part for physics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfew puzzles relating to a small fraction of my endeavors in the 1950s are summarized herein, with answers to a few questions of the Editor-in-Chief, to suggest that the rules of variability in time complement the rules of genetics as a biological variability in space. I advocate to replace truisms such as a relative constancy or homeostasis, that have served bioscience very well for very long. They were never intended, however, to lower a curtain of ignorance over everyday physiology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe suggest a putative benefit from timing nutriceuticals (substances that are both nutrients and pharmaceuticals) such as antioxidants for preventive or curative health care, based on the proven merits of timing nutrients, drugs, and other treatments, as documented, i.a., in India.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomed Pharmacother
October 2003
Taking the heart rate (HR) for one cycle, whether to examine behavior in the region of periods of 1 s, 1 day, 1 week, 1.3 or 10.5 years, etc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-experimentation concerns not only scientists, but also each individual for the sake of his/her chronobiologic health and science literacy, eventually to be acquired in primary and secondary education. Public education ensures that everybody who knows how to read or write can dispense with the service of a costly scribe. At all ages, public education can teach equally well how to find out whether one's blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) responds to an increase in sodium intake with a rise, with no change or with a decrease in BP.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn order to re-examine the extent to which secular circulatory variation can be resolved into possibly accountable, if not yet predictable behavior, the 15-year record of blood pressure and heart rate of an adult male cardiologist (Y.W.) is reanalyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGeomagnetic activity has a strong half-yearly but no precise yearly component in its spectrum, as Armin Grafe suggested nearly half a century ago. We have postulated elsewhere that non-photic cycles such as those in geomagnetics may have signatures in the biosphere and vice versa that biological rhythms have likely counterparts in the physical environment. Accordingly, we document phenomena characterized by a prominent about half-yearly variation, re-analyzed to constitute the start of a transdisciplinary chronomic (time structural) map, aligning these conditions with a half-yearly cycle in the geomagnetic index Kp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGliding spectral windows illustrate the changes as a function of time in the relative prominence of signals in a given frequency range, viewed in 3D or as surface charts. As an example, the method is applied to a 2,189-year series of averages of ring measurements on 11 sequoia trees published by Douglass. Analyses of the original data and after filtering reveal, among others, components with periods of about 10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvidence for the ubiquity and partial endogenicity of about-weekly (circaseptan) components and multiples and/or submultiples thereof (the multiseptans) accumulates as longer and denser records become available. Often attributed to a mere response to the social schedule, circaseptan components now have been documented to characterize environmental variables related to primarily non-photic solar effects. Plausibly, like circadians, circaseptans are anchored in genomes, from bacteria to humans, via both an internal and external evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the past half-century, the differences found in the spectral element of marriages vs. divorces in Tokyo reveal a half-year aspect which increasingly dominates in marriages, probably as a result of a mix of socio-economic, climatic and/or geomagnetic, as well as human affection-related factors, On the other hand, a decadal component is prominent in divorces, possibly in association with non-photic solar activity. Sparser (yearly, not monthly) records, obtained over a century at different latitudes in Japan, demonstrate that the decadal components are not consistent in moving spectra of original (as yet not detrended) data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSystem time is defined as the duration (T) and sampling density (deltat) of a given study. A time horizon is obtained by combining analytical results on endpoints of time structures (chronomes), usually on control groups, from accumulating diverse studies carried out with drastically different values of T and deltat. These two design considerations depend upon and are limited by resources.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To review mechanisms of circadian variations in heart rate variability (HRV) and blood pressure variability (BPV) and mortality and morbidity due to cardiovascular diseases (CVD).
Methods: Results from 7-day/24-h HRV and BPV are interpreted by gender and age-specified reference values in the context of a Medline search.
Results: Abnormal HRV and BPV measured around the clock for 7 days provides information on the risk of subsequent morbid events in subjects without obvious heart disease and without abnormality outside the conventional (in the sense of chronobiologically unquantified) physiological range.
This study aimed to describe quantitatively some changes in sleep behavior. During 70 consecutive nights, 28 women and 3 men, 30 to 40 years of age and presumably clinically healthy, recorded the time of each awakening. Time of falling asleep were estimated from markings at 10-min.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review provides evidence that the bioengineering community needs to develop cost-effective, fully unobtrusive, truly ambulatory instrumentation for the surveillance of blood pressure and heart rate. With available instrumentation, we document a disease risk syndrome, circadian blood pressure overswinging (CHAT, short for circadian hyper-amplitude-tension). Circadian hyper-amplitude-tension is defined as a week-long overall increase in the circadian amplitude or otherwise-measured circadian variability of blood pressure above a mapped threshold, corresponding to the upper 95% prediction limit of clinically healthy peers of the corresponding gender and age.
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