Do young women and men differ in the physiological relationship between cardiac output, total peripheral resistance, and muscle sympathetic nerve activity?
Young men and women rely on fundamentally different integrated physiological mechanisms to maintain normal arterial pressure, with women lacking the sympathetic-hemodynamic balance observed in men.
Among young normotensive men, a reciprocal balance between cardiac output and sympathetic nerve activity is important in the regulation of arterial pressure. In young women, the balance among cardiac output, peripheral resistance, and sympathetic nerve activity is unknown. Consequently, the aim of this study was to examine the relationship of cardiac output and total peripheral resistance to muscle sympathetic nerve activity in young women. Multiunit peroneal recordings of muscle sympathetic nerve activity were obtained in 17 women (mean+/-SEM: age 24+/-3 years) and 21 men (mean+/-SEM: age 25+/-5 years). Mean resting muscle sympathetic nerve activity was lower in women compared with men (19+/-3 versus 25+/-1 bursts minute(-1); P0.05) or cardiac output (r=0.23; P>0.05) in women. Our results demonstrate that men and women rely on different integrated physiological mechanisms to maintain a normal arterial pressure despite widely varying sympathetic nerve activity among individuals. These findings may have important implications for understanding how hypertension and other disorders of blood pressure regulation occur in men and women.
Hart et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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