Does abnormal body weight (underweight or overweight/obese) reduce heart rate variability in healthy adult women compared to normal weight?
Both underweight and overweight/obese healthy adult women exhibit reduced heart rate variability compared to normal weight individuals, indicating reduced adaptive flexibility of autonomic cardiac function at extremes of adiposity.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is altered in obese subjects, but whether this is true also in underweight (UW) subjects is still under debate. We investigated the HRV profile in a sample of healthy adult women and its association with adiposity. Five-minute resting state electrocardiographic activity was recorded in 69 subjects grouped according to their body mass index, [23 normal weight (NW), 23 overweight/obese (OW) and 23 UW). Body fat mass (FM) was measured by bio-impedance. Frequency- and time-domain analyses were performed. Compared to NW, UW and OW subjects showed a significant decrease in HRV indices, as revealed by spectral analysis. No differences were observed between UW and OW subjects. A second-order polynomial regression unveiled an inverted U-shaped relationship between FM extent and HRV indices. A decrease of HRV indices was associated with changes in FM extent, proving that in UW and OW subjects, the adaptive flexibility of autonomic cardiac function was reduced. These findings provide important clues to guide future studies addressed to determine how changes in adiposity and autonomic cardiac function may contribute to health risk.
Triggiani et al. (2015) studied this question.