Effect of Stress on Cardiorespiratory Synchronization of Ironman Athletes.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the cardiorespiratory synchronization in athletes subjected to extreme physical stress combined with a cognitive stress tasks. ECG and respiration were measured in 14 athletes before and after the Ironman competition. Stroop test was applied between the measurements before and after the Ironman competition to induce cognitive stress. Synchrogram and empirical mode decomposition analysis were used for the first time to investigate the effects of physical stress, induced by the Ironman competition, on the phase synchronization of the cardiac and respiratory systems of Ironman athletes before and after the competition. A cognitive stress task (Stroop test) was performed both pre- and post-Ironman event in order to prevent the athletes from cognitively controlling their breathing rates. Our analysis showed that cardiorespiratory synchronization increased post-Ironman race compared to pre-Ironman. The results suggest that the amount of stress the athletes are recovering from post-competition is greater than the effects of the Stroop test. This indicates that the recovery phase after the competition is more important for restoring and maintaining homeostasis, which could be another reason for stronger synchronization.

Complexity analysis of sleep and alterations with insomnia based on non-invasive techniques.

For the first time, fractal analysis techniques are implemented to study the correlations present in sleep actigraphy for individuals suffering from acute insomnia with comparisons made against healthy subjects. Analysis was carried out for 21 healthy individuals with no diagnosed sleep disorders and 26 subjects diagnosed with acute insomnia during night-time hours. Detrended fluctuation analysis was applied in order to look for 1/f-fluctuations indicative of high complexity. The aim is to investigate whether complexity analysis can differentiate between people who sleep normally and people who suffer from acute insomnia. We hypothesize that the complexity will be higher in subjects who suffer from acute insomnia owing to increased night-time arousals. This hypothesis, although contrary to much of the literature surrounding complexity in physiology, was found to be correct-for our study. The complexity results for nearly all of the subjects fell within a 1/f-range, indicating the presence of underlying control mechanisms. The subjects with acute insomnia displayed significantly higher correlations, confirmed by significance testing-possibly a result of too much activity in the underlying regulatory systems. Moreover, we found a linear relationship between complexity and variability, both of which increased with the onset of insomnia. Complexity analysis is very promising and could prove to be a useful non-invasive identifier for people who suffer from sleep disorders such as insomnia.