Peculiarities of the autonomic balance assessed through heart rate variability analysis in sportsmen and nonsportsmen

Abstract

A comparative study was used to analyze the difference in autonomic balance assessed by time and frequency domain parameters of heart rate variability (HRV) between students athletes and non-sportsmen. Five-minute digital ECG trays were recorded in 21 students - athletes, 10 basketball players recruited from first league clubs of No- vi Sad and the Serbian representatives and 11 rowers from the Novi Sad rowing club 'Danubius'. The control group was formed by 15 non-sportsmen, students of the Medical faculty in Novi Sad who underwent the same registrations. Time and frequency-domain of HRV were analyzed by a software developed by the company 'Neurosoft', VNS-Spektr, Ivanovo, Russia. Resting heart rate in athletes was significantly lower (p < 0.01) than in non-sportsmen. In time-domain parameters HRV significantly higher values were present in the group of sportsmen as opposed to non-sportsmen RRNN (p < 0.01), RMSSD (p < 0.02) and pNN50 (p < 0.01). In frequency-domain of HRV statistically significant difference between the two groups was observed only in normalized values of LF and HF (p < 0.05) and their ratio LF/HF (p < 0.02). LFn was larger in non-sportsmen than in students-athletes. On the other hand HFn was larger in athletes than in non-sportsmen. The LF/HF ratio was larger in non-sportsmen (2.87 0.34) than in athletes (1.91 0.20). After dividing the athletes recruited for this investigation into two groups (basketball players and rowers) significant level of difference (p < 0.05) in HRV data was present only in the VLF spectrum (2060.55 290.68 ms2 for rowers and 1303.30 ± 169.95 ms2 for basketball players).

Keywords

• heart rate variability
• sportsmen