Analysis of the Chaotic Characteristics of Human Colonic Activities and Comparison of Healthy Participants to Costive Subjects.

Constipation is a common yet distressing disease that has high rates of morbidity and impacts patients' quality of life. However, there is no perfect method to distinguish costive patients from healthy subjects. Is there chaos in human colonic activities? Are there any differences for the chaos indicators of colonic activities between healthy and costive subjects? Can these indicators distinguish patients with constipation from healthy subjects? To answer these questions, colonic pressure data from 16 healthy subjects and 48 patients with constipation were analyzed using the chaos theory. Three chaotic indicators [i.e., the largest Lyapunov exponent (LyE), correlation dimension (CorDim), and Kolmogorov entropy (KoEn)] were calculated and compared between groups with the Wilcoxon rank sum test. As a result, the LyE was greater than zero and the CorDim was fractioned, which showed that human colonic activities have clear chaotic characteristics. Statistically significant differences were observed between groups for CorDim (p < 0.05), whereas LyE did not show statistically significant differences between groups. The chaotic indicator of CorDim was able to differentiate between patients with constipation and healthy subjects. The chaos theory provides a new method for learning the nonlinear dynamics of human gastrointestinal activities.