Why the study?
Does cardiovascular and autonomic reactivity to stress, and its relationship with sleep quality, differ between females with essential hypotension and normotensive controls?
Does cardiovascular and autonomic reactivity to stress, and its relationship with sleep quality, differ between females with essential hypotension and normotensive controls?
Essential hypotension is associated with blunted autonomic and cardiovascular reactivity to stress, which interacts differently with sleep quality compared to normotensive individuals.
Blunted reactivity and divergent sleep correlations in hypotensives should not change practice; hypothesis-generating for prospective validation.
In this work, we aimed to clarify the autonomic involvement in the cardiovascular down-regulation in essential hypotension. The relationships between cardiovascular response and sleep quality were also examined. Thirteen female hypotensives and 13 female normotensives performed a stress task followed by polysomnography. Measures derived from blood pressure monitoring, impedance cardiography, and heart rate variability were collected. Hypotensives exhibited lower cardiovascular and autonomic activation than controls during the task. While a better sleep quality (i.e., higher sleep efficiency and lower nocturnal wakefulness) correlated with a reduced reactivity in normotensives, the opposite pattern occurred in hypotensives. The results suggest that a blunted response in both autonomic branches underlies the cardiovascular hypoactivation in hypotension. Further, good sleep seems to be associated with optimal levels of physiological reactivity.
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Covassin et al. (2013) studied this question.
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