The variabilities of blood pressure and pulse arrival time in normotensive young subjects under dynamic conditions

Investigators are paying more attention to blood pressure variability (BPV) because of its associations with target-organ damage in hypertensive subjects and cardiovascular morbidity. In spite of its importance, parameter for continuous and non-invasive BPV estimation has not been studied systematically. In this study, the relationships between the variabilities of BP and pulse arrival time (PAT) were investigated on 8 normotensive subjects (aged 28+/-4 years) under resting and dynamic conditions. The continuous brachial BP and intermittent arterial BP were measured by Finometer and automatic BP machine respectively. The BPV and PATV were regarded as the beat-to-beat differences of BP and PAT respectively. The results of this study showed that arterial SBP increased significantly (p<0.05) after exercises but the increase of arterial DBP was insignificant. Furthermore, PATV was inversely correlated with SBPV in both resting (r=-0.56) and post-exercise (r=-0.58) conditions but not with DBPV. In summary, the acute effects of exercises on the correlation between BPV and PATV after mild exercises should be further investigated in the future with improved experimental procedures and new design of dry electrodes.