A simple method for the routine assessment of heart-rate variation in autonomic neuropathy

A simple method is described for the rapid assessment of respiratory heart-rate variation (HRV) by making use of an EMG machine to record the RR-interval of the electrocardiogram. The built-in software for single-fibre EMG usually incorporated in modern EMG equipment is sufficient for a rapid data analysis based on the difference between the shortest and longest RR-intervals recorded over a period of 60 to 100 s. Measurements of HRV obtained by our new method correlate well with those obtained by the more tedious conventional manual measurement of an ECG recording (r = 0.88).