The Turkish Journal of Pediatrics
2009 , Vol 51 , Num 5
The Evaluation of Cardiovascular Response to Exercise in Healthy Turkish Children
1Department of General Education, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Cyprus, and 2Department of
Internal Medicine, İstanbul University İstanbul Faculty of Medicine, and 3Institute of Cardiology, İstanbul University,
and 4Department of Pediatric Cardiology, İstanbul University, Cerrahpaşa Faculty of Medicine, and 5Department of
Cardiology, İstanbul University İstanbul Faculty of Medicine, İstanbul, Turkey3%BC
The purpose of our study was to determine the normal cardiovascular responses
of healthy Turkish children to exercise and to determine the reference values.
Two hundred and eighty-four healthy children (115 girls, 169 boys) aged
5-14 were enrolled in the study. Exercise time (ET), workload that can be
tolerated with exercise (MET value), change in heart rate (Δ HR), peak
systolic and peak diastolic blood pressures (SBPmax and DBPmax), change in
systolic blood pressure (Δ SBP), and peak rate-pressure product (RPPmax) were
positively correlated with age. There was no correlation between peak heart
rate (HRmax) and age and there was also no significant increase in change in
diastolic blood pressure (Δ DBP) with increasing age. The means ± SD values
for ET, workload, HRmax, Δ HR, SBPmax, DBPmax, Δ SBP, ΔDBP, and RPPmax
were 13.18±1.4 min, 8.56±0.93 MET, 171.46±1.91/min, 67.22±6.65/min,
125.16±13.36 mmHg, 73.32±4.06 mmHg, 24.3±5.96 mmHg, 7.2±6.9 mmHg,
and 21504.7±2176.4, respectively. The values found in our study may be
accepted as reference values of healthy Turkish children for exercise testing.
The formula modified as (200-age) x 0.85 is thought to be more suitable to
predict the target heart rate in children.r%20
Keywords :
cardiovascular response, exercise testing, healthy children, reference values.