13th International Congress
THE "NEW FRONTIERS"
OF ARRHYTHMIAS 1998

January 24-31, 1998
Marilleva, Trento, Italy

RT-219

Endurance training improves vagally-mediated heart rate recovery after exercise in hypertensive athletes. Assessment by heart rate spectral analysis

Gaetano Diricatti, Vincenzo Cupelli*, Paolo Manetti, Loira Toncelli, Bruno Cappelli, Giorgio Galanti**, Gian Franco Gensini.
*Istituto di Medicina del Lavoro, **Scuola di Medicina Sportiva, Istituto di Clinica Medica Generale e Cardiologia, Universita di Firenze, Italy

Introduction

During dynamic exercise, heart rate increases through a combined effect of sympathetic activation and vagal withdrawal. On the contrary during recovery heart rate rapidly decreases through vagal reactivation¹.

It has been shown that aerobic exercise training can accelerate such vagally-mediated heart rate recovery in healthy people². On the other hand experimental and clinical studies have shown that cardiovascular autonomic alterations play an important role in systemic hypertension³.

The purpose of the present study was to define whether aerobic exercise training can improve vagally-mediated heart rate recovery in hypertensive subjects by means of power spectral analysis of heart rate variability.