Assessment of autonomic tone over a 24-hour period in patients with congestive heart failure: Relation betweeen mean heart rate and measures of heart rate variability

Patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) are characterized by an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system, which may contribute to the progression of circulatory failure and influence survival. However, it is still unclear whether CHF is characterized by a suppression of the diurnal variation in autonomic tone that is observed in normal subjects. To characterize the circadian variation in autonomic tone in patients with ventricular failure, ambulatory 24-hour Holter monitor recordings were obtained in 20 patients with CHF; 4-minute epochs of data from very hour of each 24-hour recording were selected. For each epoch we calculated the mean hear rate (HR) and, by applying spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV), we quantified the magnitude of the total (0.02 to 0.9 Hz), sympathetically governed low frequency variability (0.02 to 0.1 Hz), and parasympathetically mediated high-frequency variability (0.1 to 0.9 Hz). These areas were also expressed as a ratio to total variability and a ratio of high to low variability. A highly significant change in the mean HR over 24 hours was observed (p = 0.0001); no changes in the measures of HRV were obtained (p < 0.03). no significant correlation was found between mean HR and any frequency domain measures. We conclude that the sustained imbalance of autonomic tone over a 24-hour period, as shown by the spectral analysis of HRV, may promote the progression of circulatory failure and predispose patients with CHF to malignant ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. The disparity between the behavior of mean HR and HRV measures implies that these variables are governed by different mechanisms that remain to be investigated.