Analysis of Cardiac Dynamics in Patients with Chagas Disease Using PCA

Chagas disease American trypanosomiasis is caused by a flagellated parasite: trypanosoma cruzi, transmitted by an insect of the genus Triatoma and also by blood transfusions. In Latin America the number of infected people is approximately 6 million, with a population exposed to the risk of infection of 70 million people. It is our interest to develop a low-cost, non-invasive methodology capable of describing cardiac dynamics within 24 hours and thus finding descriptors of dynamics that allow early detection of cardiac abnormality caused by T. cruzi. We analyzed the first and second principal components of the PCA of the 8 HRV indices of the 24-hour RR records in patients with ECG abnormalities (CH2), patients without ECG abnormalities (CH1) who had positive results Serological findings for Chagas disease and healthy (Control) matched for sex and age. We found significant differences (p-value<0.05) between the three groups Control-CH1, Control-CH2 and CH1-CH2 up to 5 continuous hours in dynamics between the, using the HRV heart rate variability indices and the PCA principal component analysis method, and we also found a lower distance from the mean dynamics in the Control group (0.020267), then the CH1 group (0.027922) and finally in group CH2 (0.034812).