Life Science Hardware and Software

Very little is known about the origins of cardiovascular risk factors like obesity and altered glucose metabolism and their development during childhood. Adolescence is a time when individuals develop their own health behaviors while gaining increasing autonomy from their parents and this development has an effect on their cardiovascular health later in life. The RIGHT Track Health Study is a longitudinal study that followed participants from age two through young adulthood in an effort to understand how self-regulatory behavior throughout childhood alters the trajectory of various cardiovascular risk factors during late adolescence via health behaviors. For this study, individuals in the RIGHT Track program were re-contacted and invited to participate in adolescent data collection in an effort to gain insight into the origins of behavior that could contribute to an increase in cardiovascular risk factors later in life. This information could be valuable to helping researchers and public health policy administrators target intervention efforts in early childhood, when preventing chronic diseases is most cost-effective and behavior is more malleable.

The researchers used an orthostatic challenge to assess autonomic function, via changes in participant’s heart rate variability (HRV), to a mild physiological stressor. This physical stressor was used as a way of comparing the autonomic function to the physiological stressor paradigms that participants underwent during their early developmental years as part of the RIGHT Track program. HRV measurements provided complementary information regarding the role of autonomic nervous system as a regulator of cardiac control. ECG and respiration recorded using a BioNomadix wireless amplifier set with wearable transmitter to collect HRV at rest. Physiological signals were sent to a BIOPAC MP150 Research System with AcqKnowledge software for collecting and exporting the data in real time.

Data from the RIGHT Track Health Study will provide valuable information for youth healthcare about how health behaviors developed during an individual’s adolescence—such as diet, physical activity, sleep and substance abuse—can later affect cardiovascular health and potentially indicate critical times for reducing certain cardiovascular risk factors by assessing their trajectories.