The endogenous circadian pacemaker imparts a scale-invariant pattern of heart rate fluctuations across time scales spanning minutes to 24 hours

Abstract

Heartbeat fluctuations in mammals display a robust temporal structure characterized by scale-invariant/fractal patterns. These scale-invariant patterns likely confer physiological advantage because they change with cardiovascular disease and these changes are associated with reduced survival. Models of physical systems imply that to produce scale-invariant patterns, factors influencing the system at different time scales must be coupled via a network of feedback interactions. A similar cardiac control network is hypothesized to be responsible for the scale-invariant pattern in heartbeat dynamics, although the essential network components have not been determined. Here is shown that scale-invariant cardiac control occurs across time scales from minutes to ∼24 h, and that lesioning the mammalian circadian pacemaker (suprachiasmatic nucleus; SCN) completely abolishes the scale-invariant pattern at time scales >∼4 h. At time scales