title: Absence of slowest oscillations in short term heart rate variability of post-myocardial infarction patients. GISSI-3 arrhythmias substudy. GISSI-3 Arrhythmias Substudy Investigators.
abstract: Despite the widely demonstrated association of reduced heart rate variability (HRV) to bad prognosis after myocardial infarction (MI), reference values for HRV parameters are still not available. The GISSI-3 Arrhythmias Substudy studied short-term HRV in a relatively unselected population of patients (324) with recent MI (13 +/- 7 days) providing the statistical description of the main time and frequency domain parameters. All HRV indices, except for the RR interval, showed a non-normal distribution generally skewed around the lowest values. Particularly, no LF power was detected in 75 patients (23%) by power spectral analysis. The absence of LF oscillation in RR spectra was associated to the lower standard deviation of normal RR intervals (SD), aging (> 65 years) and blood pressure hypertension. This result seems to indicate a paradoxical effect of sympathetic overactivity in post-MI patients.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Trento, Italy. nollo@itc.it
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nollo
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Del Greco
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Disertori
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Santoro
authors.forename: A P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Maggioni
authors.forename: G P
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Sanna
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001145:Arrhythmias, Cardiac / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology; D004562:Electrocardiography; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009203:Myocardial Infarction / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010507:Periodicity; D011379:Prognosis; D013564:Sympathetic Nervous System / Q000503:physiopathology