Complexity (or its opposite, regularity) of heart period variability has been related to age and disease but never linked to a progressive shift of the sympathovagal balance. We compare several well established estimates of complexity of heart period variability based on entropy rates [i.e., approximate entropy (ApEn), sample entropy (SampEn), and correct conditional entropy (CCE)] during an ex...

INTRODUCTION Patients with severe acquired brain injury (ABI) are often mobilised using a tilt-table. Complications such as orthostatic intolerance have been reported. The primary objective of this study was to investigate if using a tilt-table was feasible for mobilising patients with severe ABI admitted for sub-acute rehabilitation. We also investigated change in arousal, treatment duration b...

This commentary regards the inferences of the findings related to the effect of crossed-education using the progressive task-oriented approach on a tilt table in stroke patients. The findings from these studies recommend that crossed-education using the task-oriented training on the tilt table was very helpful for the function and rehabilitation of lower limb and clinical scores in acute and ch...

In physiological conditions, heart period (HP) affects systolic arterial pressure (SAP) through diastolic runoff and Starling's law, but, the reverse relation also holds as a result of the continuous action of baroreflex control. The prevailing mechanism sets the dominant temporal direction in the HP-SAP interactions (i.e., causality). We exploited cross-conditional entropy to assess HP-SAP cau...

QUESTION Is wearing a night splint as effective as standing on a tilt table in preventing ankle dorsiflexion contracture and promoting the ability to stand up early after stroke? DESIGN Randomised trial with concealed allocation, assessor blinding, and intention-to-treat analysis. PARTICIPANTS 30 patients undergoing rehabilitation who were not yet walking and within three weeks of their fir...

[Purpose] The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of strength training using a sliding rehabilitation machine (SRM) on the gait function of cerebral palsy children. [Subjects and Methods] Thirteen children aged 6-18 years participated in the SRM training for 8 weeks (30 min/day, 2 times/week). The SRM is designed for the performance of a closed-kinetic chain exercise in which...

BACKGROUND In chronic Chagas disease (ChD), impairment of cardiac autonomic function bears prognostic implications. Phase‑rectification of RR-interval series isolates the sympathetic, acceleration phase (AC) and parasympathetic, deceleration phase (DC) influences on cardiac autonomic modulation. OBJECTIVE This study investigated heart rate variability (HRV) as a function of RR-interval to ass...

The "push-pull" effect denotes the reduced tolerance to +Gz (hypergravity) when +Gz stress is preceded by exposure to hypogravity, i.e., fractional, zero, or negative Gz. Previous studies have implicated autonomic reflexes as a mechanism contributing to the push-pull effect. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that nonautonomic mechanisms can cause a push-pull effect, by using ...