Sex Differences in Heart Rate Nonlinearity by Multifractal Multiscale Detrended Fluctuation Analysis

Recent developments of detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) provide multifractal/multiscale (MFMS) descriptions of the heart rate self-similarity, a promising approach to cardiovascular complexity. However, it is unclear whether the MFMS DFA may also describe the nonlinear components of heart rate variability. Our aim is to define MFMS DFA indices for quantifying the short-term and long-term degree of the heart-rate nonlinearity and to apply these indices to detect possible sex-related differences.We recorded the inter-beat-interval (IBI) series in 42 male and in 42 female healthy participants sitting at rest for about 2 hours. For each series j, we generated 100 phase-randomized surrogate series. We applied the MFMS DFA to estimate the self-similarity coefficients α over scales τ between 8 and 512 s and moment orders q between -5 and +5, obtaining coefficients for the original series, α
^O,j
(q, τ), and for each surrogate, α
^i,j
(q, τ) with 1≤i≤100. We first evaluated π
^j
(q, τ), percentile of α
^i,j
(q, τ) distribution in which was α
^O,j
(q, τ). Then we calculated the percentages of scales where π
^j
(q, τ) was <; 5% for 8≤τ≤16 s (short-term nonlinearity index NL
₁
(q)) and for 16≤τ≤512 s (long-term nonlinearity index NL
₂
(q)). We found that NL
₁
(q) was generally greater than 50% at all q≥0 but q=2 (i.e., moment order of the monofractal DFA), while at q<; 0 it was high in males only, with significant sex differences at q=-1 and q=-2. Results indicate that the multifractal DFA may highlight nonlinear heart-rate components at the short scales that are not revealed by the traditional monofractal DFA and that appear related to gender differences.Clinical Relevance- This supports the use of MFMS DFA to integrate the linear information from traditional spectral methods of heart rate variability in clinical studies aimed at improving the stratification of the cardiovascular risk.