Phyllis K. Stein, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine
Director, Heart Rate Variability Laboratory
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Education
- AB Physics: Barnard College, New York, NY (1959)
- MEd Exercise Physiology: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (1987)
- PhD Health Promotion: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (1990)
Research Interests
The focus of the HRV (Heart Rate Variability) Laboratory is on extracting prognostic markers for cardiovascular mortality, non-cardiovascular mortality and autonomic dysfunction from continuous ECG recordings. Markers include: traditional and non-linear HRV, QT variability and t-wave alternans. We are also interested in the use of Holter recordings to detect sleep apnea and other sleep-disordered breathing and in integrating heart rate patterns from ECG and other parameters derived from polysomnography to characterize normal and abnormal sleep and using that for risk stratification
The HRV Laboratory has over 15,000 stored, carefully analyzed beat-to-beat files from Holter recordings in multiple large studies, including the Cardiovascular Health Study, the ENRICHD study, the EPHESUS study, the CAST study, other pharmaceutical trials and various other smaller studies. This archive includes the actual signals from about half of the studies. We have also analyzed HRV from mice. The lab also performs HRV analyses for other investigators and shares data with other investigators so that they can apply with novel analytic technicques. The lab also has hundreds of stored sleep studies from the Sleep Heart Health Study.