Nonrandom variability in respiratory cycle parameters of humans during stage 2 sleep

We analyzed breath-to-breath inspiratory time (TI), expiratory time (TE), inspiratory volume (VI), and minute ventilation (Vm) from 11 normal subjects during stage 2 sleep. The analysis consisted of 1) fitting first- and second-order autoregressive models (AR1 and AR2) and 2) obtaining the power spectra of the data by fast-Fourier transform. For the AR2 model, the only coefficients that were statistically different from zero were the average alpha 1 (a1) for TI, VI, and Vm (a1 = 0.19, 0.29, and 0.15, respectively). However, the power spectra of all parameters often exhibited peaks at low frequency (less than 0.2 cycles/breath) and/or at high frequency (greater than 0.2 cycles/breath), indicative of periodic oscillations. After accounting for the corrupting effects of added oscillations on the a1 estimates, we conclude that 1) breath-to-breath fluctuations of VI, and to a lesser extent TI and Vm, exhibit a first-order autoregressive structure such that fluctuations of each breath are positively correlated with those of immediately preceding breaths and 2) the correlated components of variability in TE are mostly due to discrete high- and/or low-frequency oscillations with no underlying autoregressive structure. We propose that the autoregressive structure of VI, TI, and Vm during spontaneous breathing in stage 2 sleep may reflect either a central neural mechanism or the effects of noise in respiratory chemical feedback loops; the presence of low-frequency oscillations, seen more often in Vm, suggests possible instability in the chemical feedback loops. Mechanisms of high-frequency periodicities, seen more often in TE, are unknown.