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During the last decade, progressive achievements in haemodynamics have shown that radial artery pulse pressure can be used to estimate the vascular properties of the internal organs. Clinical experiments have shown that slow and regular respiration has a large effect on the heart rate variability (HRV). This phenomenon is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). It is known that respiration-related oscillations in venous return cause oscillations in stroke volume and blood pressure. It also can be inferred from cardiac output that systemic blood pressure has a similar respiration-related cycle. Moreover we found that the fluctuations of harmonics of arterial pulse are consistent with the fluctuation of HRV. This means that the whole cardiovascular system (CVS) makes rapid adaptation during respiration, and the harmonic proportions of arterial pulse were modified during different breath rates. This result shows that the regular respiration also has a large effect upon Windkessel properties of CVS.

Cerebral autoregulation (CA) was assessed by chaotic analysis based on mean arterial blood pressure (MABP) and mean cerebral blood flow velocity (MCBFV) in 19 diabetics with autonomic neuropathy (AN) and 11 age-matched normal subjects. MABP in diabetics dropped significantly in response to tilting (91.6 +/- 14.9 vs. 74.1 +/- 13.4 mmHg, P < 0.05). Valsalva ratio of heart rate was reduced in diabetics compared to normal (1.1 +/- 0.1 vs. 1.5 +/- 0.2, P < 0.05). It indicated AN affects the vasomotor tone of peripheral vessels and baroreflex. Nonlinear results showed higher correlation dimension values of MABP and MCBFV in diabetics compared to normal, especially MABP (3.7 +/- 2.3 vs. 2.0 +/- 0.8, P < 0.05). It indicated CA is more complicated in diabetics. The lower Lyapunov exponent and the higher Kolmogorov entropy values in diabetics indicated less predictable behavior and higher chaotic degree. This study suggests impaired autoregulation would be more chaotic and less predictable.

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