Relation of left ventricular mass and filling to exercise blood pressure and rest blood pressure

Ninety-two young men with normal blood pressure (BP) or borderline elevated BP underwent echocardiography and maximal exercise testing to study whether left ventricular (LV) mass and the mitral inflow velocity pattern are more closely related to BP measured during dynamic exercise than to pressure measured at rest. LV mass was significantly related (p < 0.05) to systolic BP measured at rest and at various workloads; however, the variance of LV mass that could be explained by exercise pressures, in addition to preexercise pressure, age, body size, resting heart rate, and peak oxygen uptake, was not significant. The ratio of the late to early mitral inflow velocity was significantly related to systolic BP at rest but not to the pressures during exercise, and there was no independent contribution of exercise BP to its variance. Thus, systolic BP at various levels of dynamic exercise does not contribute independently to the interindividual variance of LV mass and mitral inflow pattern in young men with normal or borderline elevated BP.