Effect of spontaneous arousals on cardio-respiratory interaction in healthy children

The aim of this paper was to study the effect of spontaneous arousals during night-time sleep on the interactions between R-R intervals and respiratory phases in healthy children. We collected overnight polysomnography data of 40 healthy children and investigated cardio-respiratory interaction before and after spontaneous arousals during stage 2 sleep using joint symbolic dynamics. The R-R time series were extracted from electrocardiograms (ECG) and respiratory phases were obtained from abdominal sensors using the Hilbert transform. Both the series were transformed into ternary symbol vectors based on the changes between two successive R-R intervals or respiratory phases, respectively. Subsequently, words of length `2´ were formed and the correspondence between words of the two series was determined to quantify cardio-respiratory interaction for pre- and post-spontaneous arousal episodes. We observed a brief but significant shortening in R-R and respiratory intervals after arousal. There was also a significant short-term increase in cardio-respiratory interaction during the first 30-second post-arousal episode as compared to 30-second pre-arousal episode (7.5±3.4 vs. 5.2±3.7%, p<;0.0001, respectively). In conclusion, spontaneous arousals in healthy children during night-time sleep are associated with a temporal but significant increase in cardio-respiratory interaction.