Cardiovascular Modifications and Stratification of the Arrhythmic Risk in Young and Master Athletes

This paper aims to evaluate the cardiovascular response to exercise in young and master athletes. The study involves comparison with control groups of untrained subjects of the same age. The paper describes in particular the processing methods and results concerning the ECG signals collected during exercise test. Methods include PNN calculation, Multiscale Entropy analysis (MSE), and a comparison between clustering and an Artificial Neural Network analysis performed by means of chaotic attractors. The analyses carried out lead to a good stratification of the subjects, especially in terms of the MSE1 variable. Future developments are underway supported by many other diagnostic tests administered to the same subjects. The project aims to evaluate the cardiovascular response to exercise in young and master athletes. The study involves comparison with control groups of untrained subjects of the same age. The complete surveys provided during the study have been: 12-lead resting ECG, cardiopulmonary exercise test, venipuncture with doses of various parameters, echocardiogram, ambulatory ECG, T-wave alternans (TWA). This paper describes in particular the processing methods and results concerning the ECG signals collected during exercise test. The presence of cardiac remodeling in elite athletes is a concept known ever since the last decade of XIX century, when the percussion techniques of the cardiac area allowed to identify an increase in the volume of the heart in subjects who practiced competitive sport. Later, the introduction into clinical practice of echocardiographic techniques has allowed us to better understand cardiac physiology of the athletes and the impact that different modes of sport and exercise training on cardiac structure and function, allowing to characterize in detail the framework of the athlete heart . In addition, modern methods of non-invasive and invasive electrophysiology contribute to deepen the possible correlation between the type and intensity of athletic