Abstract
Extract: Circadian pericdicity of body temperature, pulse rate, respiratory rate, systolic, and diastolic blood pressure has been studied in 143 patients. The ages of the patients varied from 3 months to 21 years. A type of power spectrum analysis was used to reduce the data to a single quantity for each of the five measurements in each patient. This quantity was examined by various methods of statistical analysis such as correlation, regression, and analysis of variance. Evidence from these ananlyses suggested that a single circadian periodicity indicator could be calculated for each patient by combining the variance in circadian periodicity for temperature, pulse, respiration, and systolic blood pressure. Analysis of this indiactor, ‘composite corcadian periodicity’, revealed highly significant correlations with age, mean levels of the physiological measurements, and duration of the study. The relation with age was best defined by a third-degree polynomial equation. The smoothed wave that was derived from the data demonstrated a peak in composite circadian periedicity at 6 years of age, with a tendency to form a plateau at about 16 years of age. Speculation: A rational extension of this study would be to apply the data to the investigation of human diease. Although ‘normal ranges’ for age are published for tempertature, pulse rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure [1, 8], many physicians modify these intuitively (lowered body temperature during the early morning hours, higher temperatures during the late afternoon and early evening). It would seem appropriate to develop normograms for these functions that incorporate the changes in mean level that occur with age, sex, and time of the day. In this way, the increased periodicity demonstrated in the child of 5 or 6 years of age, as well as the decreased periodicity in the younger and older subjects, would be accounted for in the normograms. The practicality of these techniques could be tested in computer-oriented diagnostic evaluations.
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