Increased cardiorespiratory coordination in preeclampsia

Physiol Meas. 2017 May;38(5):912-924. doi: 10.1088/1361-6579/aa64b0. Epub 2017 Mar 6.

Abstract

Preeclampsia is one of the main sources of morbidity in pregnancy with a high mortality rate without a known ultimate cause. Using a corpus including 927 measurements of pregnant women with and without different hypertonic diseases at multiple stages of pregnancy, we utilised a new approach to analyse cardiorespiratory coordination. Since the recording quality of respiratory effort was limited due to a high signal to noise ratio, we applied an ECG derived respiration approach to create an ersatz respiratory signal. After applying the few available recordings with a sufficiently high quality of the respiratory signal to validate the substitute, coordigrams were calculated and quantified by utilising an epsilon method. We showed significant (p < 0.05) differences in the coordination in a matched (BMI, age, gestational week) comparison of preeclamptic and healthy subjects. Hopefully future applications of and improvements on these methods are able to create a fast and convenient prediction methodology to reduce the impact of this disease as well as help in the determination of its underlying cause.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Electrocardiography
  • Female
  • Heart / physiopathology*
  • Humans
  • Pre-Eclampsia / physiopathology*
  • Pregnancy
  • Respiration*
  • Signal-To-Noise Ratio