The Human Heart: Deviating from the Golden Ratio and Diagnosing Disease

The golden ratio (golden section, golden mean, divine proportion) is an irrational number whose value is approximately Φ = 1.618. The golden ratio has imposed itself throughout history as a kind of principle of unison and harmony that is so subtly and fascinatingly repeated in nature, science, art, and even in the structure and function of the human body. What is typical for the golden ratio is that it places the larger segment in relation to the smaller segment, uniting them into a single whole, which again place it in the same relationship with its larger part. If we consider the cardiac cycle as one such whole, its “larger segment” would refer to the diastolic phase, while the “smaller segment” would refer to the systolic phase of one cardiac cycle. In this article, the mathematical processing of 100 ECG records included the measurement of intervals representing the systolic and diastolic phases of the cardiac cycle, where the ratio of diastolic and systolic phases, and the ratio of one cardiac cycle and diastolic phase was obtained. The study has shown that people with normal ECG records have a ratio of the diastolic and systolic phases of the cardiac cycle, and the cardiac cycle and the diastolic phase, which are very close to the golden ratio. On the other hand, persons whose ECG records indicate certain pathological conditions in the heart muscle have ratios of diastolic and systolic phase, and of the total cardiac cycle and diastolic phase, which deviate to varying degrees from the value of the golden ratio. It has been shown that for a certain pathological condition there is a characteristic deviation of the diastole/systole and cardiac cycle/diastole ratio from the number Φ, which opens the possibility of applying this method as a potential diagnostic or screening method in rapid analysis of ECG records.